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Potential Upper Limits of Nicrosil Compounding (and how to become one)


Halyo_Alex

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This didn't so much arise as a showerthought as much as it was a "2 am insomnia thought".

It occurs to me, that, with the proliferation of Medallions capable of giving the user the power to make Unkeyed Nicrosilminds (that is, a Medallion that grants F-Aluminum + F-Nicrosil), people will be able to store their metalborn powers in unkeyed nicrosil and give it to someone else to tap with a medallion that gives F-Nicrosil. Neat, you can rent metalborn powers if you have F-Nicrosil.

Where this gets a bit zany is when you consider Nicrosil compounding. A nicroburst (such as, oh I dunno, Era 3's protagonist) could burn unkeyed nicrosil to recieve tenfold the power stored inside it. Given that we know F-Nicrosil works similarly to F-Copper (storing discreet things rather than a reservoir of power like say, pewter), this means that a Nicrosil Twinborn could infinitely (read: for as long as they could afford allomantically accurate Nicrosil) compound their Nicrosil Feruchemy to an arbitrary level of power. ...By itself, that doesn't sound all that great. But remember, we've established that you can "borrow" other metal powers, kind of like Nalthian Breath transfer. They could, in theory, take someone's allomancy and compound it to an arbitrary strength, and then give it back to the original owner, who now has allomantic strength on par with... well, however much power this Soulburst (Soulbearer+Nicroburst) can muster. Lerasium-mistborn (but for a single metal), Lord Ruler... Who knows. If the Soulburst can get ahold of an extra copy of Nicrosil allomancy, they could compound it an arbitrary number of times and keep it for themselves to expedite the process by being able to shove more allomantic power into that feruchemical trait to duplicate it faster.

Where this got fun for my "2 am insomnia thoughts" brain was with my other pair of metalborn powers, duralumin compounding. With this compounding method, you could give someone stupidly powerful duralumin allomancy... Which again, doesn't sound that useful, much like stupidly powerful Nicrosil feruchemy. (Which, brief side note, is the natural-born twinborn combo "I" have. The compounding was obtained via power sharing medallions and gracious donations from other Metalborn) However, with the ability to Compound Duralumin at arbitrarily fast speeds (burning allomantic duralumin at arbitrarily high strength alongside a duraluminmind) I of course thought "...Can you just... supercharge a Nahel Bond with this? And wait, if Nicrosil stores "investiture" and that really means "powers" like Allomancy and Feruchemy, does that mean you can store and then compound the Surges themselves from a bonded Radiant spren? Can you become arbitrarily potent in Surgebinding with these two Compounding abilities?" And with me being a Lightdancer I then realized "wait. I can Soulcast Duralumin to burn, and there's a WoB that Duralumin Allomancy would be able to directly power Surges... So if there is a net gain in power from using Duralumin to Soulcast Duralumin, I don't even need Stormlight to Surgebind!"

And of course me being me I have to take this a theoretical step further and throw in Reverse Compounding (tl;dr my belief for RC is that you can store allomantic power inside the matching metalmind if you have the matching metal for your powers). So with Reverse Duralumin Compounding, I can store a Duralumin... burst? What even is that called? like using Steel produces a "steelpush", and nicrosil produces a "nicroburst", so... Duraluminburst?
:mellow: Anyway. I can in theory store allomantic duralumin's effect inside duraluminminds and then tap that to have power that can fuel the Surges. No nicrosil-storing-stormlight needed, if that's even possible (though would be moot for myself, as I have both).

So yeah, kind of a rambly post about how I realized I am in fact incredibly overpowered and should not be allowed to exist but people like this could still exist in era 4 because of Medallions and probably also Soulcasting fabrials... Huzzah... :P

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9 minutes ago, Halyo_Alex said:

There almost certainly is some flaw in my logic.

No.  Your logic seems fine based on what we know.  I just think that something we don't know is going to come along and yank on our understanding of how medallions work.  Some reason exists that they can't be burned.  The southerners have at least a few nicrobursts.  They would have tried this.

Edited by Karger
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