hemalurgic construct difficulty

[cometaryorbit]

We're told that TLR/the Inquisitors experimented for a thousand years and never developed any new Hemalurgic constructs.

Yet adding new spikes to an existing one seems trivial. Ruin presumably is super expert at Hemalurgy, so HoA Ruin-controlled Inquisitors might be a special case, but TenSoon can swap in and out OreSeur's Blessing of Potency without any trouble, and Ruin's not helping him.

So what's the line between modifying an existing construct (easy) and making a new one (incredibly hard)?

In BOM it's suggested that while you can add new Blessings to a kandra that already has its own (like TenSoon) trying to mix-and-match (as was attempted with ReLuur) is trouble.

So maybe it's just that there has to be a "base set" of spikes defining each Hemalurgic construct "species" (one Blessing for a kandra, 4 iron spikes for a koloss)?

But Inquisitors don't seem to have a standardized set of spikes. (The original ones all had F-Gold, but not all later ones did.)

Unless there really is a standard set (steel/iron for sight, bronze for finding skaa Mistings, pewter, etc) it's just that no Inquisitors have *only* the standard set and nothing else?

Yet apparently it's really hard to give kandra Allomancy or Feruchemy, so I guess they can't just pick up Inquisitor spikes the way TenSoon picked up OreSeur's Blessing?

[Frustration]

So koloss and inquisitors are separate races from humans. That's the big difference, adding spikes to inquisitors and they are still inquisitors, but make a human an inquisitor and they are no longer human.

Kandra are kind of a grey area as how they are distinct from Mistwraiths is not heavily explored other than that the spikes act as a way for their minds to function.

[+ShardlessVessel]

I think the issue here is that you're not just adding strength, or power, or whatever you're spiking. You're splicing a spiritweb into another.

Some modifications may just make you stronger, for example, but some must just kill you, or horribly deform you in ways that nullify the advantages the spikes would give you.

[Duxredux he/him]

I actually was just wondering how Kandra bind points work, particularly in the case of TenSoon. Did he swap out spikes, use all four, and did he experience massive mood swings and changes to his personality during the process? I didn't pick up on differences in his temperament while using the Blessing of Potency.

As for the difficulty with adding spikes or altering Hemalurgic Constructs, I think there may be a distinct difference between granting Allomantic or Feruchemical powers to someone that remains more or less human in shape compared to creating a new entity like the Koloss, at least that was the sense I got from the excerpts we get from Spook's book. Somewhere, additional experimentation had to have been done to figure out the bind points for A-Chromium which we know was found. I'm not sure why, but granted powers seems easier for some reason than making a Kandra or a Koloss.

I think it's totally possible to create Hemalurgic constructs that aren't sustainable, sapient, or particularly useful. Warping the soul likely has really weird effects, and we know that Inquisitors at least require a linchpin spike to keep them alive for some reason. I think it's totally possible to just kill or warp a hemalurgic test subject without knowing exactly when such a linchpin or pairing of spikes is necessary. It wouldn't surprise me if TLR and the Inquisitors' experiments created the Chimeras that Bleeder set on Wax and TenSoon but never considered them useful compared to Koloss or Kandra. Yes, the Chimera's spike was Trellium and it has weird properties, but I find it a bit more probable that Paalm witnessed some of the experiments than just came up with them herself, considering her own spike still allows her to operate as a Kandra.

[cometaryorbit]

On 6/22/2022 at 4:03 PM, Duxredux said:

I actually was just wondering how Kandra bind points work, particularly in the case of TenSoon. Did he swap out spikes, use all four, and did he experience massive mood swings and changes to his personality during the process? I didn't pick up on differences in his temperament while using the Blessing of Potency.

 

We do see him add OreSeur's Blessing - he just adds two new ones (doesn't swap out like Paalm) by putting them in his body then dissolving some organs and re-forming them pierced by the spikes. And no, there's no noticeable change (even in his POV) during the process.

It is commented in Bands of Mourning that using another kandra's spikes when you don't have your own causes all those problems (when they're discussing ReLuur) so I think TenSoon was protected since he had both spikes of his own Blessing the whole time, unlike either Paalm or ReLuur.