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The exact mechanism of electrum countering atium - explained


Oversleep

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For a long time I was wondering why a simple basic metal allows to counter the effects of a godmetal.

The short answer: it doesn't.
The longer answer: it doesn't, but actually does.

The true answer:
Here we go.
Let's start with everything we know:

  • Atium burners see a single shadow of every object they see. The shadow shows the future of the object, few seconds at best.
  • Somebody burning electrum sees his own multiple shadows
  • Somebody burning electrum is said to be protected from atium

Now, how are "vortexes of shadows" created?

  • When another person sees your reaction to their atium shadow. They can act on it, what results in atium shadow splitting. Reference: Vin killing Zane.
    It's like that:
    Person 1 will do thing1.
    Person 2(burning atium) sees this and adjusts their movement.
    Person 1 sees the adjustment, quickly concludes thing1 and chooses to do thing2.
    Person 2 sees atium shadows split to thing1 and thing2.
    Image:

  • When another person also burns atium. You can see their atium shadow, what they want to do and you can adapt your behaviour based on it. But since they also burn atium, they see what you want to do and what you want to do in relation to their behaviour. So they adjust their movement and so on. Since most of it happens subconsciously, it all happens at once. That's how a Feedback Atium Loop is created, resulting in multiple atium shadows.
  • When you burn electrum, you see what you're about to do, so you can adjust what you want to do, this will create another electrum shadow which you will see and also can change your mind... So even without any atium burner nearby electrum creates a vortex of shadows (somehow confirmed at the beginning of HoA). That is Feedback Electrum Loop.
  • Now, since electrum burner has multiple ways he can go, when you burn atium, you will see multiple shadows of electrum burner. For an observer burning atium you will also have multiple atium shadows.

Mind you, if you constantly change your intentions, this will result in your atium shadow changing. But what causes them to multiply is acting on the hints from the future.

Edited by Oversleep
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Not that this is necessarily contradictory, but Electrum shows your own future, yes? So it shows any future where you are killed/trapped/freaking out because the Atium burner predicted your movements.

As such, you decide not to take any of the paths that end with your doom, being a smart Mistborn.

So it's poor mans Atium; you can see yourself die or succeed, and have a rough idea how to choose that option, but you can't see anyone else or what they've done.

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But you could also say that in atium vs. atium situation. But we know it's impossible. Atium does expand your mind to react, but to one, maybe two shadows, not dozens of them. Similarly, reacting to few of multiple electrum shadows won't be possible.

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I feel like consciously trying to act opposite to your predetermined action would be pretty difficult in a fight if you felt that it were the best course, unless you saw the vague results of such an action. Also, unless electrum also heightens cognitive speed, it would be difficult to analyze your numerous shadows and change your action based on them quickly enough to counter Atium. The Atium burner could simply see what action the electrum burner would take next by the orders the shadows appeared, due to their temporarily enhanced minds. A lower quantity of shadows would be produced for the same reason. Seeing the result of your action could cause a much faster reaction, and because your reaction would likely change at the last minute, the Atium burner would have more trouble compensating

Edit: Ninja'd

Edited by Bugsy6912
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Just chiming in to say I agree with the OP, that's been my understanding of Electrum-shadows and their interaction with Atium.

 

I dare say that Atium is a small version of what shardic future sight looks and acts like.

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On the other hand his power does have a history of being good at spiritual realm intervention (hemalurgy), so it makes a twisted sort of sense.

Guess "Ruin" being more of an immediate sort of concept wasn't working out too well for him.

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Making it rather ironic that it's granted by the physical manifestation of a shard that is notoriously bad at that.

 

Bad is a relative term.  I don't think it's a coincidence that it doesn't allow you to see very far.  Just enough to get an edge in battle, really.  Ruin does need to see the future, to some extent.  Just not as far as others.

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The whole issue with atium being associated with time abilities (seeing future, storing age)... The way I see it, Ruin is enthropy, so it means passage of time.

BTW, I wonder what happens when you burn electrum and atium at the same time. They seem to be quite complementary. Shame Elend didn't have any electrum burning when he duraluminum burned atium.

Now, what could you learn if you burned gold, malatium, atium and electrum at the same time and then burned duralumin?

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The whole issue with atium being associated with time abilities (seeing future, storing age)... The way I see it, Ruin is enthropy, so it means passage of time.

BTW, I wonder what happens when you burn electrum and atium at the same time. They seem to be quite complementary. Shame Elend didn't have any electrum burning when he duraluminum burned atium.

Now, what could you learn if you burned gold, malatium, atium and electrum at the same time and then burned duralumin?

 

I've always interpreted it as Ruin's future sight abilities being tied most closely with his form in the Physical Realm (after all, that's where he affects the future the most) whereas Preservation's were associated with his mind (as one attempting to Preserve something would need to plan far into the future to do so); therefore, he would have needed to be reunited with it to regain his divination abilities.

 

As for why Elend didn't have any electrum burning while using atium, I believe you said it best yourself--burning electrum may very well interfere with one's own atium burn (although it does beg the question: Shouldn't any future sight create such a feedback loop? After all, you are changing your actions as a result of seeing the future, which changes other's actions, etc.).

 

If you created a maximum internal temporal burn, you would probably be able to see, very briefly, the past and future of everything surrounding you, but, as with Kelsier's visions in SH, you would probably quickly forget the majority of it, rendering it largely pointless.

Edited by Three1415
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  • 1 month later...

But you could also say that in atium vs. atium situation. But we know it's impossible. Atium does expand your mind to react, but to one, maybe two shadows, not dozens of them. Similarly, reacting to few of multiple electrum shadows won't be possible.

 

...imagine a twinborn with Electrum allomantically, and Zinc Feruchemically. it'd be like self-atium, and you could actually make sense of the shadows.

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  • 2 years later...
On 3/14/2016 at 3:03 PM, Bugsy said:

I feel like consciously trying to act opposite to your predetermined action would be pretty difficult in a fight if you felt that it were the best course, unless you saw the vague results of such an action. Also, unless electrum also heightens cognitive speed, it would be difficult to analyze your numerous shadows and change your action based on them quickly enough to counter Atium. The Atium burner could simply see what action the electrum burner would take next by the orders the shadows appeared, due to their temporarily enhanced minds. A lower quantity of shadows would be produced for the same reason. Seeing the result of your action could cause a much faster reaction, and because your reaction would likely change at the last minute, the Atium burner would have more trouble compensating

Edit: Ninja'd

You could use feurchemical Zinc if you were twinborn.

On 3/15/2016 at 2:23 PM, Oversleep said:

Now, what could you learn if you burned gold, malatium, atium and electrum at the same time and then burned duralumin?

I think his mind would break.

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In Mistborn, we see that the way atium works (with respect to using its "future sight" in combat) is that you can see what other people will choose to do a few seconds ahead of time, and adjust or react to that choice before it happens. Specifically, it works on the premise that a person's actions are completely determined by their nature/character, and the information known to them at that instant in time.

Therefore, anything that complicates, pollutes, or delays the information known to that person - or I guess, the identity/character of that person - in those same few seconds, while still allowing that person to change his/her actions in that window, results in "atium shadow splitting".

Burning atium in response to an atium burner reflects back infinite recursive shadows, as each Allomancer's future path adjusts to account for the other one's adjustments, and so on.

Burning electrum lets the Mistborn or Oracle see, and avoid, the specific actions that would lead to their own immediate demise. It wouldn't let them see the other Allomancer's future choices like atium would, but simply having information about their own potential futures that shifted with the choices made would cause the "atium shadows" to spring up for the attacker.

What Vin did with Zane, despite not burning either atium or electrum, is the third way: she delayed making any choice at all until she saw her own (singular) atium shadow's prediction, as reflected in Zane's reaction to it, then did something else. For that to work, you'd still have to be very quick in physical reaction time (burning pewter is almost a must), to gain even a split second in which to react, and also have an unerring killing instinct that would immediately know what best other course of action to take (don't stab from the right - jab in the throat from the left). Any indecision along the lines of "OK, well, now what?!", absent a tappable Feruchemical zincmind as a crutch, would make it useless.

There's a potential fourth defense, too, I guess, involving randomicity, but it'd be difficult for a human to do. Imagine a robot with six arms attacking an atium burner, each armed with a poisoned tip, where at any given instant of attack, two of the six arms would jab at the Allomancer. There would be 15 possible combinations to defend against. If the robot predicated its choice on a simple internal random number generator, it might not be enough to generate atium shadows since it'd be operating on deterministic software. But if the robot predicated its choice based on something related to or predicated on what the Allomancer was doing at that instant, it could generate shadows. Sure, if the Allomancer knew this was going on he could just stand perfectly still, but without forewarning, such an algorithm could probably confuse an atium burner for a bit, probably enough to let a poison jab through.

Edited by robardin
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Wow, @robardin, you explained it better than me.

As for the fourth way - given the way that seeing the future works in Cosmere, I think it depends on the way the randomness is generated. Most generators aren't truly random; only pseudo-random - those would probably generate atium shadow. The truly random ones would probably cause multiple atium shadows.

At least, that's how I see it.

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2 hours ago, MountainKing said:

I actually think that electrum only produces one shadow and once you see it you can react to it which causes the multiple electrum-shadows.

That's exactly how it works and isn't being debated. It produces a singular shadow like anything with Atium. But seeing the shadow changes your knowledge and changes the future which changes the shadow, etc, etc. Causing the cascade. 

Electrum is atium for the self. Using it is inherently using it against someone with foreknowledge. 

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4 hours ago, Oversleep said:

As for the fourth way - given the way that seeing the future works in Cosmere, I think it depends on the way the randomness is generated. Most generators aren't truly random; only pseudo-random - those would probably generate atium shadow. The truly random ones would probably cause multiple atium shadows.

I agree - that's why I added the part about having the robot's algorithm needing to incorporate the Allomancer's actions (the one burning atium) to seed its random number generation. Let's say arms 1 and 3 are set to attack, and when the Allomancer moves to dodge to avoid arms 1 and 3, those arms immediately deactivate and two arms randomly activate, seeded by something about what the Allomancer just did.

So at "time zero", the initial atium shadow from the robot would be very clear (that arms 1 and 3 are going to attack)... But unless the Allomancer always moved in a very predictable way himself, as soon as he moved to dodge it any variable possibilities among his actions ("maybe I'll go left / right / up / down to avoid or block arms 1 and 3") would result in a cloud of his own making.

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On 3/16/2016 at 10:04 AM, Three1415 said:

If you created a maximum internal temporal burn, you would probably be able to see, very briefly, the past and future of everything surrounding you, but, as with Kelsier's visions in SH, you would probably quickly forget the majority of it, rendering it largely pointless.

Just combine it with a coppermind and you're golden (copper?). Although I do wonder what putting a spiritual realm memory into a coppermind would be like and if it would do anything weird.

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4 hours ago, Slimy_Slider said:

Just combine it with a coppermind and you're golden (copper?). Although I do wonder what putting a spiritual realm memory into a coppermind would be like and if it would do anything weird.

You'd still have to pull it out and be capable of processing it for it to be useful.
I think you could store the memories, but you'd have the same comprehension problem when you eventually tried to tap them.

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