Jump to content

The case for A-Gold F-Copper Twinborn


MountainKing

Recommended Posts

Allomantic Gold allows one to see into their alternate future, and Feruchemic Copper allows someone to store recent memories.  (I will Add Quote later) When Vin burns gold and touches her gold shadow she briefly has access to her gold shadows memories and thoughts. What id someone stored Copper while touching their gold shadow. I think they will probably have access to all of their gold shadow's memories at best and only recent memories at the least. And if skilled Allomancers can influence which gold shadow appears, think about how overpower it is. Want to learn how to be a banker, burn gold and then store copper. If a A-Gold F-Copper was a detective, and he wanted to solve a murder, create a gold shadow that witness the murder. I know that all of the Gold Shadow's information will not be accurate, but the closer they are to the current present, the more likely the information will be correct.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can A-gold actually give you infinite "alternate career paths" like that...?

It seems like you're picturing something along the lines of what Shai does in The Emperor's Soul with her soulstamps of a highly trained warrior warrior, a multi-linguistic scholar, and a contortionist, street-savvy beggar based on "plausible versions" of herself with a rewritten past of being adopted by a warrior society, and so on.

But she carved those soulstamps herself, over many years. There's no indication that an Augur can choose a particular "gold shadow" - the one that pops up automatically seems to be either the most likely alternative, or the most opposite one based on personality (i.e., the "other you" you'd despise the most, and vice versa). 

In any case I don't think even Shai could make a soulstamp of something specific she didn't know - like "the version of me that saw a specific murder happen that I did not witness". Let's say a murder happened one night at a restaurant - Shai could probably make a soulstamp of a version of herself that ate at that restaurant every night, requiring a plausible backstory leading up to it, but I think that would just mean that version of herself could, say, detect a subtle change in the recipe used for a long time (a generic result of "I eat there literally all the time"), not "I now recall the events of two weeks ago around 8pm, when I was of course there, even though I wasn't really". 

Also, the experience of burning gold, and especially of touching one's "gold shadow", is described as being "very disturbing." If being able to selectively "summon" even extremely unlikely alternate versions of yourself were something an A-gold savant could learn to do, without knowing that was an end possibility, I don't know that any given Augur would burn enough gold to get to that level of savantism. In-world, after all, "burning gold" is literally an expression synonymous with "something useless and/or to be avoided".

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Probably wouldn't work as well as you're hoping, based on this WoB:

Quote

Questioner

In The Emperor’s Soul, Forgery allows you to Forge your soul to create a different past. My question is, would on Scadrial burning gold in a controlled way allow you to do something like that?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, you guys are good. So, they are similar but different. I would say that no, gold is not gonna do this exact thing. They're working from the same fundamental roots, but gold is a lot more bounded in what it can accomplish.

source

(Emphasis mine)

Regardless of how useful it may be, the idea of storing your gold-shadow's memories in a coppermind is fascinating to me.  And there is a small chance that your gold-shadow would have useful skills/memories you can take advantage of.  You'd just have little-to-no control over what those skills/memories turn out to be.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What if the "gold shadow" turned out to be similar to the deal with ... that one Epic in Sanderson's non-Cosmere Reckoners series whose main power involve pulling from what is a pretty specific alternate reality (a "neighboring" reality, if you will)...?

Without spoiling that reference, perhaps one's gold shadow is "real" from where they come from (where "you" would be the gold shadow to them)?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting idea... But I kind of doubt it, based on how the Cosmere is set up (or based on what little I understand of it, at least).  If that were true, I'd imagine that Shards could break through the "walls" between realities and cause all sorts of crazy stuff, not the least of which would be continuity issues. ;) I don't think the existence of alternate realities fits with the Cosmere's relatively tidy rules.

BTW, this comic came instantly to mind when I read your post, 

2 hours ago, robardin said:

perhaps one's gold shadow is "real" from where they come from (where "you" would be the gold shadow to them)?

Image result for calvin and hobbes reflection in puddle https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/04/26 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

okay this concept intrigued me... sadly @MountainKing i don’t think that A-gold works as similarly to forgery as you are assuming. i don’t think that it shows you every version of yourself if you were to make different decisions in the past, my impression is that t is more limited. 

HOWEVER i was thinking that maybe things might be different for a gold savant. but then i realized, i have no idea how a gold savant would work because i really don’t understand how A-gold works. 

does A-gold show you a past version of yourself? or a version of yourself were you to make different past decisions? i never could quite rap my mind around how the past temporal metals work

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 5/18/2018 at 5:29 PM, MountainKing said:

Well technically alternate realities sort of exist in the spiritual realm that's how allomantic gold, atium, electrum, and the fortune mechanic

Fair enough.  I'm not discounting the possibility of alternate Cosmere realities per se, I'm just saying that I doubt those alternate realities are as "real" as what robardin was talking about.  I could be wrong, though.  I mean, it's Spiritual Realm stuff, so who knows?

23 hours ago, MountainKing said:

So I'm pretty sure that A-Gold shows you another version of you in the present if you made different choices in the past.

Yes, this is how Gold Allomancy works.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Gold Allomancy is, in my opinion both more strictly bound, and more complicated than this.

It doesn't just show you another possibility, it makes you feel that. So I think that storing anything into a coppermind in those moments would be difficult, because you wouldn't be storing one set of thoughts, but two. 

Here's the description of Vin burning gold. 

Quote

She was in two places at once. She could see herself, and she could see herself.

One of her was a strange woman, changed and transformed from the girl she had always been. That girl had been careful and cautious—a girl who would never burn an unfamiliar metal based solely on the word of one man. This woman was foolish; she had forgotten many of the things that had let her survive so long. She drank from cups prepared by others. She fraternized with strangers. She didn’t keep track of the people around her. She was still far more careful than most people, but she had lost so much.

The other her was something she had always secretly loathed. A child, really. Thin to the point of scrawniness, she was lonely, hateful, and untrusting. She loved no one, and no one loved her. She always told herself, quietly, that she didn’t care. Was there something worth living for? There had to be. Life couldn’t be as pathetic as it seemed. Yet, it had to be. There wasn’t anything else.

Vin was both. She stood in two places, moving both bodies, being both girl and woman. She reached out with hesitant, uncertain hands—one each—and touched herself on the faces, one each

Neither of those seem to be Vin as she is, but two aspects of her whole personality split into a whole being. 

The same seems to be true when we see Miles burn gold. 

Quote

But gold was not completely useless. Just mostly so. Upon burning it, Miles split. The change was visible only to his own senses, but for a moment, he was two people, two versions of himself.

One was the man he had been. The angry lawkeeper, growing more bitter by the day. He wore a white duster over rugged clothing, with tinted spectacles to shade his eyes against the harsh sun. Dark hair kept short and greased back. No hat. He’d always hated those.

The other man was the man he’d become. Dressed in the clothing of a city worker—buttoned shirt and suspenders over dirty trousers with fraying cuffs. He walked with a slouch. When had that begun?


He could see through both pairs of eyes, think both sets of thoughts. He was two people at once, and each one loathed the other. The lawkeeper was intolerant, angry, and frustrated. He hated anything that broke with the strict order of the law, and meted out harsh punishments with no mercy. He had a special loathing for someone who had once followed the law, but had turned his back upon it.


The robber, the Vanisher, hated that the lawkeeper let others choose his rules. There was really nothing sacred about the law. It was arbitrary, created by powerful men to help them hold power. The criminal knew that secretly, deep down, the lawkeeper understood this. He was severe toward criminals because he felt so impotent. Each day, life grew worse for the good people, the people who tried, and the laws did little to help them. He was like a man swatting mosquitoes while ignoring the gash in his leg, an artery open and throbbing gushes of blood onto the floor.

Miles thinks of the two as who he was, and who he has become... But I really don't think it's that straight forward. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

The problem with F-Copper is 2 fold. The memory is sucked from your mind when you store the memory and it degrades the more you handle that memory. So if you become a banker based off those memories you're going to lose the benefits of those memories in a short amount of time since presumably you will be doing the job on a daily basis. You're going to have to gain experience quite quickly in order to maintain the edge this gives you (if it's even possible in the first place).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Chaos locked this topic
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...