Retrieving Breaths After Spiking An Awakener

[Trusk'our he/him]

Let's say an Allomancer were to go to Nalthis and buy him or herself a healthy number of Bio-Chromatic Breaths, then get attacked by someone trying to Hemalurgically spike them. The Allomancer/Awakener Awakens their cloak to try and protect themselves, but their attacker manages to spike them and give themselves the Allomancer's power. The Hemalurgist then retrieves the Breaths from the Cloak because they have enough of the Allomancer's Identity to grab the Breaths.

If the Hemalurgist were to lose their spike, would the Breaths taken from the Allomancer/Awakener stay but be un-commandable, dissipate, or remain pretty much the same as if they had gotten them through normal means?

[Quantus he/him]

The issue at play is Identity, and as far as we know (he's RAFO'd msot questions) it works more or less the same as with Metalminds, just with the Identity being a bit more pliable during transfer.  Assuming that is the case, I think it would "Muddy" the Identity enough that the hemalurgist would not be able to access them unless and until he restored the Identity Spike, IF Stored in an Object.  When they are just held by the Awakener they are actively Investing and Augmenting the person (granting Heightenings and such), and so I dont think they are Separate from the person enough to have a different Identity and would "Update" with the person themselves when the Spike was removed, or perhaps just be in the blended "both work" encoding as if it were spike-donor's metalmind.

 

 

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Lucadaw

If someone used Hemalurgy to take someones Feruchemical abilities would they be able to use that persons personal metalminds? Most relevantly perhaps to take that person's knowledge from their copperminds?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Lucadaw

If someone stored their identity in an aluminium metalmind, then had their powers and metalminds stolen via Hemalurgy, then the person who took the powers used the aluminium metalmind to draw out the first persons identity would it permanently overwrite their personality with the original persons ? ( would kind of be a long winded way of stealing someone else's body and becoming immortal )

Brandon Sanderson

All Identity questions are a RAFO until I deal with it more in the books. (Sorry.)

WeiryWriter (in response to the first answer)

If the spike granting Feruchemy were to be reforged/split into two distinct spikes which are then implanted into two different people, could those two people "share" a metalmind (as in actually be able to tap something the other stored and vice versa?).

Brandon Sanderson

It's complicated, but no.

There would be too much of the other person mixed in. Both could use the metalminds of the person the Feruchemy was stolen from, but when they made their own, their own Identity would "muddy" the creation.

Worldbuilders AMA (Dec. 7, 2015)

 

 

 

 

[Returned he/him]

There are a lot of suppositions in the scenario, which makes it hard to suggest an answer with any degree of confidence-- we don't really know if some of the steps would work, or exactly how they might work in relation to different powers and Cosmere mechanics. Out of curiosity, why is the subject of this an Allomancer?

However, I will offer a suggestion that, if the sequence of events you describe works as you describe it, the outcome should be that the Breaths end up stored in the Hemalurgist but inaccessible; it would be similar to putting the Breaths into an object. The power still exists because nothing has consumed or destroyed it, but the circumstances which allowed it to be used are no longer in force. But the only reason the Hemalurgist was able to interact with the power in the first place is the stolen Identity, so it was never "theirs" in the way that keyed Investiture seems to have worked so far. Lose the key, lose access to what's behind the lock.

Whether or not the passive powers of holding holding the Breaths would still be active (the Heightening) is harder, and I don't have a good guess as to what would happen. This is all fundamentally opposed to how Endowment has worked (that we've seen, at least) that it seems like we'd be looking at full-on, red-eyed corruption of Investiture.

[Trusk'our he/him]

8 hours ago, Returned said:

There are a lot of suppositions in the scenario, which makes it hard to suggest an answer with any degree of confidence-- we don't really know if some of the steps would work, or exactly how they might work in relation to different powers and Cosmere mechanics. Out of curiosity, why is the subject of this an Allomancer?

I made the victim of the Hemalurgic spiking in this scenario an Allomancer because it made sense that the Hemalurgist would want to spike them, and it would be guaranteed that the Hemalurgist would be able to attach a enough of the Allomancer/Awakener's Identity via the Hemalurgic spike (one that contains a power, not a human attribute like the ones that will turn you into a Hemalurgic construct such as a Koloss) that they would be able to retrieve the Breaths from the Awakened object, similar to a Feruchemist's Metalminds.