Hemalurgic Spikes and Mummies

[Trusk'our he/him]

You can store a Hemalurgic spike in a cut of meat in order to trick it into thinking that it's inside an actual body, preventing a decay of its Investiture.

Spoiler

JordanCon 2021 - Arcanum (coppermind.net)

LadyLameness

The Inquisitors keep spikes in jars to stop the Hemalurgic decay. Is that clotted blood? Like, does it just work with clotted blood?

Brandon Sanderson

It will. So what's going here is the spikes have to - this is a weird Cosmere thing - the spikes have to think they're in a body and you gotta trick them. You don't need to use blood but that's the easiest thing that they could do to make it work. You could also leave it in a piece of meat.

LadyLameness

You can put the stake in the steak!

Brandon Sanderson

You can put a stake in a steak. But there are plenty of ways to do this without doing that. But yes, it's pretty gross.

LadyLameness

Not that I think they have consciousness very much, but I imagine that they're a bit stupid if they think that clotted blood is the same as a human body.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. You're just tricking the stupid piece of metal that has a little bit of extra Investiture and has become slightly self-aware, and so it keeps its charge and doesn't... yeah. There are much better modern ways of doing this that have started to be used.

But what about mummified bodies? Would a Steel Inquisitor that was mummified preserve the Investiture of the spikes still buried in its body?

As a slightly more comical side note, would a cut of jerky be enough to preserve a Hemalurgic spike's charge?

[alder24]

12 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

But what about mummified bodies? Would a Steel Inquisitor that was mummified preserve the Investiture of the spikes still buried in its body?

As a slightly more comical side note, would a cut of jerky be enough to preserve a Hemalurgic spike's charge?

Oh boy. I think a mummy will to some degree, however spikes would still dacay but slower. A mummy is dried piece of flesh, with internal organs removed (even the brain was removed) and no blood.

I think the spiritweb of the meat must be relatively fresh, and must consider itself to be still a part of a body, to some degree, so it could trick a spike - being wet and bloody helps. A jerky or a mummy don't have that anymore, so they either wouldn't work, or would only partially prevent decay.

[Trusk'our he/him]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

Oh boy. I think a mummy will to some degree, however spikes would still dacay but slower. A mummy is dried piece of flesh, with internal organs removed (even the brain was removed) and no blood.

I think the spiritweb of the meat must be relatively fresh, and must consider itself to be still a part of a body, to some degree, so it could trick a spike - being wet and bloody helps. A jerky or a mummy don't have that anymore, so they either wouldn't work, or would only partially prevent decay.

Oh, I have another thought- what about coating a spike in dried blood? The WoB I mentioned earlier says that it doesn't need to be fresh, so maybe you could keep a spike's Invested charge maintained for a while without needing to change its container.

 

[Quantus he/him]

It sounds like that WOB is saying it just needs to realmically "feel" like the spike is in a person, and that blood or meat are simply easy ways to do that.  So it sounds like it needs some lingering Investiture of Life, the basic bit that resists pushing metal inside a person, etc. to prevent the leakage, and if meat does it then we are not talking about a lot of Investiture.    

If that's the actual realmics involved, storing the Spike in something organic that is Awakened even a little might do it too.