Actually, Maybe You Don't Need That Trueself's Permission

[Trusk'our he/him]

I had come up with an idea before on how a Trueself Ferring could blank their Identity while having their power taken Hemalurgically, which would blank the Identity of the spike. The power could be given to other Metalborn, who in turn could blank their Identity to make Compounding and combining Invested charges a viable option with those spikes.

This would require that you have willing donors, however, as you can't reliably force someone you're stealing a power from to blank their Identity.

I'm now wondering if perhaps I've been overthinking the problem.

If you gave a Hemalurgic spike that provided access to Feruchemical aluminum to a Hemalurgist, they could blank their Identity (and that of their spikes, presumably) to make Compounding possible for as long as they blanked their Identity- it wouldn't matter if the spike had an Identity tied to it, since you could blank it anyway.

This wouldn't make it possible to stack Investiture in a single spike (no supercharged Hemalurgy ) and you'd need an additional spike to make the Compounding viable (a legitimate concern when you're dealing with a max of three, maybe four or five spikes if you don't mind Shardic intervention), but without the need of a willing donor, this feels like it would be a much more achievable solution to the problem of Compounding via Hemalurgy.

I suppose you could upgrade this if you had multiple people working together; a natural Misting (say, a gold Misting) or someone willing to take another Hemalurgic spike could take the Feruchemical side of what they wanted to Compound and Feruchemical aluminum, then they could blank their Identity and Compound large stores of the desired attribute. Since the attribute is now Identity-free, the Hemalurgist's buddies could access those stores for their own use (only one Compounder is needed for the group assuming that you aren't going to be needing a constant intake of whatever power you're using).

[alder24]

4 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

If you gave a Hemalurgic spike that provided access to Feruchemical aluminum to a Hemalurgist, they could blank their Identity (and that of their spikes, presumably) to make Compounding possible for as long as they blanked their Identity- it wouldn't matter if the spike had an Identity tied to it, since you could blank it anyway.

I don't know if by blanking your own identity you would also blank the identity in a spike. 

[Trusk'our he/him]

5 minutes ago, alder24 said:

I don't know if by blanking your own identity you would also blank the identity in a spike. 

Yeah, that's definitely one of the big "ifs" in this hypothesis of mine.

I wonder if a natural Misting who blanked their own Identity with an Identityless F-alumin spike could still Compound with another spike even if that spike had an Identity and couldn't be blanked, since we've seen that you don't necessarily need to blank both the practitioner and the Investiture in question to make the two be able to interact (i.e., Wayne is able to tap an Identityless Goldmind in BoM).

[alder24]

3 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

I wonder if a natural Misting who blanked their own Identity with an Identityless F-alumin spike could still Compound with another spike even if that spike had an Identity and couldn't be blanked, since we've seen that you don't necessarily need to blank both the practitioner and the Investiture in question to make the two be able to interact (i.e., Wayne is able to tap an Identityless Goldmind in BoM).

Yes, but normal Feruchemy isn't restricted by Harmony like Hemalurgy is. Harmony might be forcing compounding to work only when both Alomantic and Feruchemical identits match. But that's another "if".

[Trusk'our he/him]

1 minute ago, alder24 said:

Yes, but normal Feruchemy isn't restricted by Harmony like Hemalurgy is. Harmony might be forcing compounding to work only when both Alomantic and Feruchemical identits match. But that's another "if".

I think that the reason Compounding via Hemalurgy doesn't work in modern Scadrial (I guess technically the entire Cosmere) is because Sazed is more Preservation-aligned in his current Intent, which is subconsciously reflected in Hemalurgy's mechanics, similar to how Harmonium is unstable due to Harmony's conflict of Intent; basically, Preservation is the dominant half of Harmony currently, and Hemalurgy reflects this by not trying to overtake and as fully control Hemalurgists as it once did.

The pieces of Spiritweb in the spikes don't "reach out" as much as they used to, because they submit to the part of Preservation present (oh, tongue twister ) in the Hemalurgist's Spiritweb, hence the reason Identity contamination prevents Compounding- the spikes don't want to force themselves too much on the Preservation of the Hemalurgists, which restricts the maximum number of spikes a Hemalurgist can get powers from and prevents Identity-barriers from being breeched as easily as they were during the pre-Catacendre era.

It's kind of cool actually, since this is very similar to what we see in RoW...

Spoiler

The Investiture of Shards picks up certain aspects of the current Vessel and their individual Intent, reflecting the Vessel's influence on the magic system as a whole.

It's also worth noting that this restriction of Hemalurgy is less likely to be a conscious decision on Sazed's part and more likely due to his Intent subconsciously "echoing" throughout his Shards, which impacts the entire system (the Ars. Arcanum talks about this at the end of TLM).

Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble. Did I explain things coherently?

[therunner he/him]

3 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

I think that the reason Compounding via Hemalurgy doesn't work in modern Scadrial (I guess technically the entire Cosmere) is because Sazed is more Preservation-aligned in his current Intent, which is subconsciously reflected in Hemalurgy's mechanics, similar to how Harmonium is unstable due to Harmony's conflict of Intent; basically, Preservation is the dominant half of Harmony currently, and Hemalurgy reflects this by not trying to overtake and as fully control Hemalurgists as it once did.

Based on what is said in Ars Arcanum it sounds to me like the opposite.
In that Compounding with Hemalurgy worked only because Ruin was actively pushing to make it work, and on its own it won't.
Similarly, the ability to gain many powers, hemalurgic decay etc. were result of Ruin actively pushing on and trying to leverage Hemalurgy more.

I.e. current Hemalurgy is 'how it is supposed to be', and Era 1 Hemalurgy was supercharged version.

Relevant Paragraph:

Spoiler

In the ancient days, Ruin was pushing hard on the fabric of Scadrial, leaking into spiritwebs through any method possible. Causing to souls to decay faster, to accept more spikes then they should have been able to, and leaving the resulting person burdened beyond what was reasonable.

 

[Trusk'our he/him]

14 hours ago, therunner said:

Based on what is said in Ars Arcanum it sounds to me like the opposite.
In that Compounding with Hemalurgy worked only because Ruin was actively pushing to make it work, and on its own it won't.
Similarly, the ability to gain many powers, hemalurgic decay etc. were result of Ruin actively pushing on and trying to leverage Hemalurgy more.

I.e. current Hemalurgy is 'how it is supposed to be', and Era 1 Hemalurgy was supercharged version.

Relevant Paragraph:

  Reveal hidden contents

In the ancient days, Ruin was pushing hard on the fabric of Scadrial, leaking into spiritwebs through any method possible. Causing to souls to decay faster, to accept more spikes then they should have been able to, and leaving the resulting person burdened beyond what was reasonable.

 

That is a fair way to interprit that.

My personal thinking is that Hemalurgy is currently being somewhat suppressed- it's currently on the opposite side of the spectrum as it used to be, weaker than the "vanilla" version of Hemalurgy should be, and that it was in a stronger than what its normal state should have been pre-Catacendre due to Ruin's influence.

But of course, we'll need to wait and see how things play out in the books to confirm if that's true.