Keepers on Ashyn

[The Gecko]

Keepers on Ashyn would be incredibly powerful.

So we know that on ashyn, magic is disease based. The example Brandon gave is that while you have the common cold, you can fly. Now who do we know that can control when they are sick?

I think it can generally be agreed upon that for most metals, tapping is better than storing, right? You would rather be fast than slow, healthy than sick, quick of thought than slow, and so on. Unless you are on Ashyn that is. What we know of Ashton is that it is incredibly hot, you get powers from being sick, and people live in the sky. If I were a Feruchemist, I would gladly spend a year or two absolutely miserable in exchange for immortality and an incredibly wealthy and comfortable life. Allow me to explain.

So our keeper heads to ashyn, with plenty of extra metalminds of all of the different metals, he finds a nice place to stay, perhaps someone to help take care of him, and he spends the next year or so absolutely miserable. He stores everything. Being in a floating city, its better to weigh less, he needs to store heat, storing senses to keep him from suffering, but most importantly, strength age and health. He needs to be as frail as physically possible. The idea is to get as sick as possible, and store all of those newly gained powers in unkeyed nicrosilminds. So you can see where this is going, he lies in bed for a year and fills all of his metalminds as well as collected tons of powers in his nicrosilminds. Even though he is intentionally close to death this whole time, he is never in danger as if he ever needs it, he can just stop storing and tap a little health to completely recover.

Now our keeper, after all this time pumping stuff into his metalminds, can sell his unkeyed nicrosilminds filled with powers, which are vastly more efficient than when normal people get them. For example, if someone has a cold for 3 days, they have the ability to fly for 72 hours, which is being wasted whenever they aren't flying. After 72 hours, the power is gone and the whole time you had it, you were sick. When you use a nicrosilmind though, you can fly for 72 hours, and whenever you aren't flying, you just stop tapping. Say you fly for one hour a day, you fly for 3 days with the cold, so 3 hours. However if you fly with the nicrosilmind, you can fly for 72 hours or 72 days. Far more efficient.

So back to our keeper, everyone on this planet can use these powers with the right sickness requirements, so as cool as it is, its nothing special. However... Over on Nalthis, nobody has ever had these powers that you can offer them, and everybody is born with something to offer to you. I bet you could get breaths incredibly easy if you talk to wealthy people with lots of breaths and offer them new magical powers with incredible length of use, remember that our keeper spent a year, or as long as he wants, collecting these powers as well as his own feruchemical powers. Assuming he sells everything he has been collecting in exchange for a massive wealth of breaths, he could gain immortality, awakening, and live a comfortable, powerful, and wealthy life wherever he wants. If he chooses to go back to ashyn and stores a few more powers, he can basically use whatever powers he wants wherever and whenever he wants, on top of his breaths and Feruchemy. 

Slightly overpowered and awesome if you ask me. I doubt it would happen in Canon, but I would love to see it so much. Tell me what you guys think.

[Leyrann]

Great idea, but I'm seeing one problem: The reason you get powers from being ill on Ashyn is because the viruses or bacteria making you ill grant the power because that increases the chance you don't try to get better, so they get to reproduce; it makes them more likely to survive from an evolutionary point of view.

If you get ill from storing health, you don't get ill from a bacteria or virus, and therefore you wouldn't get the power.

[Calderis]

1 hour ago, Leyrann said:

If you get ill from storing health, you don't get ill from a bacteria or virus, and therefore you wouldn't get the power.

Per Wayne's perspectives, storing health makes it far more likely you will catch something though, because your immune system is weakened. 

Edited June 27, 2018 by Calderis

[The Gecko]

I get what you are saying, but as we saw Wayne storing health, he often had some sort of cold. When I think of storing health, I don't think it makes him have some sort of cold, I've always thought it just makes him incredibly susceptible to illness. The bacteria doesn't care how they get it, only that they survive to pass it on

[Weltall]

While storing health it would definitely be easier to catch one of the illnesses that grant magic on Ashyn, since you've got an intentionally weakened immune system. I was going to say something about how I don't think that F-Nicrosil could necessarily store the resulting power because you get it from a bond with the disease vector (as part of their survival strategy) and we know that bond-based magics are trickier to mess with when it comes to things like hemalurgy. Then I saw this:

Quote

kingbirdy (paraphrased)

Could Feruchemical nicrosil be used to store other Invested abilities, such as a Returned Breath or the abilities of the Knights Radiant?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, that's possible.

source

Given that Surgebinding could hypothetically be stored with F-Nicrosil, it looks like it would indeed be possible to do the same for Ashyn's magic. So, kudos for coming up with a clever 'hack'.