Feruchemy of forged objects

[+Oltux72 he/him]

Suppose there is a factory that makes masts of steel and masts of duraluminium. The former are cheaper. I being concious of costs purchase the cheaper one and forge it into the more expensive material. Now comes a feruchemist and stores in the metal. Can he or she store into it? What happens to the stored Investiture once the seal is broken?

[Dunkum he/him]

I believe this would work.  it would be a bit harder to use as a metalmind since the forged object would already be invested, but forgery uses relatively little investiture, so it shouldn't be too much harder.  as to what happens to the investiture when the seal is removed, that's a bit trickier. we have an answer for soulcasting a metalmind that would probably apply here as well:

 

Quote

Questioner

So, suppose you had a goldmind that was filled. And you tried to Soulcast into iron. What would happen to the Investiture inside it?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the Investiture would remain in there, but it's keyed to the wrong thing, so you wouldn't be able to get it. It'd be much harder to Soulcast that, by the way. The more Invested, the harder it is. But Soulcasters are used to it, because everything has Investiture, and most of what they're Soulcasting. They deal with this, so it's something they're kind of expert at. So, this is not outside reason, that it could happen. You could give it to your average Soulcaster on Roshar, and they could make it happen. You just wouldn't be able to get the Investiture out of it anymore.

but i'm not 100% certain since forgery overwrites an object's history, and now you are messing with pseudo-time-travel questions.  I think the investiture would stay in place and just be inaccessible, but i can't shake the feeling that removing the seal would retroactively remove the investiture because it wouldn't be possible for it to have been placed there in the first place.

 

EDIT: I did find another WoB (though I didn't copy it) suggesting that burning a forged metal would work until the stamp was broken and the forgery reversed, so using it as a metalmind should work too, though again with some interference from the investiture of the forgery itself.

Edited December 30, 2021 by Dunkum

[Trusk'our he/him]

On 12/30/2021 at 11:20 AM, Oltux72 said:

Suppose there is a factory that makes masts of steel and masts of duraluminium. The former are cheaper. I being concious of costs purchase the cheaper one and forge it into the more expensive material. Now comes a feruchemist and stores in the metal. Can he or she store into it? What happens to the stored Investiture once the seal is broken?

seeing as how you can use a Hemalurgic spike to both grant a power and to use it as a Feruchemical storage, I'd say that you could probably use a Forged object as a Feruchemical storage as well. You'd probably not be able to fill it as much as a regular piece of metal though, since it's already partially full from the Forgery.

Plus, if the seal of the Forgery breaks and the metalmind reverts to it's previous type of metal, you're not going to be able to tap it, since the investiture within it is not 'keyed' to the proper metal to allow Feruchemical access.

[Narcoleptic Axolotl he/him]

Well that would be a tough forgery in the first place. Making steel think it's duralumin? If you remember from The Emperor's Soul, forging a material into another material is possible, but it won't stick long if the forgery is unlikely. For example at the beginning, when she's thinking about how to forge her way out of the jail cell, she'd have to know which quarry each brick was harvested from, then convince it that it were actually taken from a weaker material by mistake, which would only have a chance of sticking (and not for very long even if it worked) if there was a deposit of that weaker material nearby the quarry. That's why most of the forgeries she does to her room are just changing things that happened, such as the stained glass window, which had been broken in the past, being replaced with more stained glass rather than regular, clear glass. She didn't change the window itself, she changed things that happened to it.

So maybe you could convince the steel that it had been soulcast into duralumin. That's probably the easiest way to make that forgery work, although you'd have to know that it was in the general vicinity of a soulcaster at one point, and that there was a realistic possibility that the soulcaster would want to change it from steel to another material.