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How do they test for cadmium mistings, anyway?


Necessary Eagle

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35 minutes ago, The Titan God said:

Spook likely would've assumed he was talking about the external enhancement metals (Chromium and Nicrosil), so those would be what they were looking for, because, unless Sazed stated otherwise, they still believed Atium and Malatium to be the external temporal metals. It is possible that in the search for chromium and nicrosil they discovered cadmium and bendalloy, but it would not have been what they were looking for.

Which is one of the reasons I think Kelsier told him. Considering what they were trying to do, he’d almost have to.

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Could Leechers help?

They wipe out Allomantic reserves, not just Investiture but the metals themselves. There's contradictory, ambiguous, RAFO-y, undecided and complicated WoBs regarding aluminium & chromium but given that in-book aluminium is used to purge metals from the body, I'm assuming chromium does the same.

Edited by Honorless
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Do we know if it's possible to burn a metal if it's encased in something? For example, take a bit of cadmium, then cover it with something that dones't break down in our digestive system (maybe wax or resin), then swallow the whole thing. If this is possible, then it would make testing for allomancy relatively safe.

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On 2/1/2021 at 4:12 PM, AquaRegia said:

Agreed.  Rereading MB Era 2 now, and nowhere is 'snapping" mentioned.

It's never really been stated, but I think the implication is likely that Allomancers now Snap at birth (as Vin did), since there's a WOB that Sazed couldn't eliminate Snapping entirely.

 

On 1/22/2021 at 2:27 PM, BenduLuke said:

The fact that Scadrians can even ingest metal indicates a resistance to metal poisoning.

There's probably some partial resistance due to either natural selection or Innate Investiture, I'd expect. OTOH, Allomancers "burn off" metals to prevent poisoning, so I don't know how much metal actually ends up being applied in a toxicologically-relevant way.

Still, it's not just obviously-toxic stuff like lead in pewter or cadmium -- Wikipedia claims that -

Toxic effects begin to occur at doses above 10–20 mg/kg of elemental iron. Ingestions of more than 50 mg/kg of elemental iron are associated with severe toxicity

So for a 50kg adult that's 500mg-1 gram for initial toxic effects or 2.5 grams+ for severe toxicity. Iron's pretty dense, so that's not much margin, if there wasn't some resistance.

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  • 1 month later...

You don't have to get the stuff into your stomach. It just has to be inside your body with perception deciding what inside means. You also have to be able to get the wrong metals out quickly. Swallowing them, unless you want to induce reverse peristaltic, as Steris demonstrated, is not optimal. To protect the innocent and because I always wanted to use that quote I will somebody else allude to the optimal solution:

Kellogg: Take Mister Lightbody immediately to the yogurt room and give him fifteen gallons.
Lightbody: Oh no, no. I can't eat fifteen gallons of yogurt.
Kellogg: Oh it's not going in that end, Mr. Lightbody.

On 9.2.2021 at 3:23 PM, Honorless said:

Could Leechers help?

They wipe out Allomantic reserves, not just Investiture but the metals themselves. There's contradictory, ambiguous, RAFO-y, undecided and complicated WoBs regarding aluminium & chromium but given that in-book aluminium is used to purge metals from the body, I'm assuming chromium does the same.

But if you swallowed the wrong metal as a Misting, it wouldn't be an allomantic reserve. It would be just an inert material. Something arcane happens between the Allomancer and the right metal even before you actively burn it.

 

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22 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

But if you swallowed the wrong metal as a Misting, it wouldn't be an allomantic reserve. It would be just an inert material. Something arcane happens between the Allomancer and the right metal even before you actively burn it.

Good point.

I just remembered, in Secret History, Kelsier swallowed a screw & then gagged it back up after realizing he couldn't burn it, not having a Physical body and all, so I was thinking, it could be that they just do something like that. Assuming they don't just see the inside of their mouth as "inside enough", not knowing how perception plays a part in what exactly constitutes as "inside" for Allomancy, they might just train their children to throw up (no cursed comparisons, plz) ingested metals.

Edited by Honorless
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