Investiture Banks

[The Stick]

I am very much of the opinion that as well the Cosmere advances into the space age, investiture banks and changers will very quickly emerge in the CS. We know the spren cities of Roshar have already started this process with transfers into perfect gemstones. It is natural that as as Cosmere technology and ability to manipulate investiture grows, investiture will become a sort of commodity. 

This is why I believe that people who are technically knowledgeable enough, likely in Silverlight, will begin making business of changing types of investiture around. Especially with Scadrian advances in Feruchemical technology. This makes me believe it is theoretically possible to do things like switching around attributes, or even using unkeyed investitures to make custom metal minds. This will make a demand for the ability to easily transfer between investiture types, which at this point can probably be rented to regular people. Naturally, very smart people who want to be rich will step in to fill this demand. 

TSM spoilers

Spoiler

The breath-equivalent-unit system makes it seem like investiture is becoming standardized. 

I'm addition, I am of the express opinion that this is the reason Canticle was constructed. It was to be a wonderful source of pretty pure investiture from the sun. One would traditionally use a high storm for this like Vasher, but the main issue would be having a bunch of weird Honor connection associated with it, which is more work to change.

In summary, I thought this was an interesting little theory and I am interested to hear thoughts.

P.S. Alder, please don't slam me with 20 WoB's

[alder24]

10 hours ago, The Stick said:

In summary, I thought this was an interesting little theory and I am interested to hear thoughts.

P.S. Alder, please don't slam me with 20 WoB's

No slamming today, I agree.

[Trusk'our]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

No slamming today, I agree.

Seems you've made a reputation for yourself friend 

[CtrlAltDepressed]

3 hours ago, alder24 said:

No slamming today, I agree.

what did you do with the real alder?

 

[Treamayne]

24 minutes ago, CtrlAltDepressed said:

what did you do with the real alder?

Spoiler

 

He's still locked in the Arcanum hunting Unmade WoBs. 

[Returned]

I agree, though I think that regular people will not have much access to bazaars in the Cognitive Realm (save for the black market, which will definitely exist). I wonder how effectively this could be accomplished... a trade in Breaths is probably not stoppable, but the ability to manufacture unkeyed metalminds seems ripe for centralized control. And Hemalurgy will upset everything anyways.

The future of the Cosmere is conflict, between worlds, groups, and Shards, and I think that as a part of the conflicts those with the ability to do so will lock down access to Investiture manifestations as thoroughly as they can. Raw Investiture, like jars of Dor, will probably have a thriving trade everywhere. Within-system commerce might be common (like Scadrians having access to a wide variety of unkeyed metalminds).

But I feel like Worldhoppers will deal with systems that discourage accumulating a variety of powers.

[Etedbert]

17 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

He's still locked in the Arcanum hunting Unmade WoBs. 

Here I was thinking he’d found all of them, but if anyone was gonna find an esoteric WOB that disproves any given theory that no one else remembers it’d be alder

[Treamayne]

13 minutes ago, Etedbert said:

Here I was thinking he’d found all of them, but if anyone was gonna find an esoteric WOB that disproves any given theory that no one else remembers it’d be alder

You can too - it's just a matter of time and practice. Here's the Tips and Tricks we wrote for searching up references:

Spoiler

Using Coppermind and Arcanum:

• Go to the Coppermind, you can search a term in the upper right. On the top-right of the page (below the search bar) you will see a circle icon that denotes how "complete" the information is (e.g. solid green means it has all known information, split white/blck means unanswered questions, etc.)
  • Like any wiki, links to other pages appear the first time they are referenced
  • While reading you will find notes ([1]) that take you to the references at the bottom of the page. From there, if the reference is a WoB the link will redirect you to the Arcanum post.
  • One useful technique (at least on PC) is to click the [1] note to go to the references section, open the reference link in a new tab, then use the browser back button to immediately return to where you were reading.
• On the Arcanum, you can read all of the WoBs from a specific event by clicking: Discover > Events, then select an event.
• When looking at a Word of Brandon (WoB - or Peter/Isaac) in the Arcanum, you can:
  • Click on the event name to read all WoBs from that event
  • Click on a tag at the bottom to make a search of all entries with that tag - such as Shards
  • The top right of the WoB has a "Copy" button, to easily copy the WoB contents to add to a forum post spoiler tag (please use soiler tags to keep posts visually short and let new people avoid spoilers if they desire)
• Also, on the Arcanum, you can search for keywords using the search bar in the upper left
  • While searching a tag, the advanced search will be at the top of the page, so you can keyword search within a specific tag (example: Searching "Honor" in #Shard tag)
• In any keyword or tag search the default view will be "accuracy"
  • Refine searches with Boolean (+/& for "and" to combine terms - e. g. Shard+Honor )
    • Note this method is unfiltered and will return more results than the tag and keyword search above
    • But they can be combined, by filtering a keyword and using a boolean search inside that tag.
  • You can be set that to "Oldest First" (avoiding spoilers) or "Newest first" (for recent additions) using the drop-down box
• For the Arcanum, learn more at Help and Navigation

Hope that helps

For example - WoBs that Reference Silverlight (51) vs WoBs Tagged #Silverlight (24) 

Edited March 26 by Treamayne
Clarity

[The Stick]

TSM spoilers

Spoiler

I do very much believe that there is a possibility that the entirety of Canticle is just one giant metal mind. Maybe because the people perceive the Invested sunlight as heat-like, and it is so important to their culture, their cognitive perception could make the investiture automatically store as heat. I do think that like Marsh suddenly deciding to draw on a whole planet worth of attribute would be really cool. What would the theoretical things you could do with a small planet full of an attribute?

 

[alder24]

10 hours ago, The Stick said:

TSM spoilers

  Hide contents

I do very much believe that there is a possibility that the entirety of Canticle is just one giant metal mind. Maybe because the people perceive the Invested sunlight as heat-like, and it is so important to their culture, their cognitive perception could make the investiture automatically store as heat. I do think that like Marsh suddenly deciding to draw on a whole planet worth of attribute would be really cool. What would the theoretical things you could do with a small planet full of an attribute?

 

TSM spoilers:

Spoiler

The planet behave like this before Threnodites settle it, that was the reason why they decided to land on Canticle, because it would force their people to always be on the run, with no time for conflicts. The planet's surface melts because it acts like a resistor for investiture flowing from the sun to the core, the material resists that flow and heats up.

 

[Arkangel]

TSM spoilers

Spoiler

I too believe that Canticle is essentially being charged up as an Investiture battery. Brandon talked about it being created by a "very powerful being" for a "very specific purpose" and then talked about megastructures and name-dropped the Grand Apparatus. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/522/#e16261

 

[+hwiles]

I definitely agree that there shall be a market for converting forms of investiture into Breath due to its utility in daily life, however, I'm still skeptical that the ultra wealthy will have much interest in converting to the more exotic forms (such as most metalminds other than copper, gold, and bronze) except for development of personal armies of super powered individuals dedicated to protecting their patrons.

And while many folks will attempt to prevent the accumulation of access to multiple independent systems and powers...it's very difficult to stop a true worldhopper who knows what they're doing. To call them slippery is a ghoulish understatement; Hoid and Kelsier don't seem to be threatened by much other than nightblood and direct personal attacks by Shards at this point...and even then, they're just too fast to catch thus far.

[The Stick]

Another thing I have been considering at length is if this would be the end of all disease. We know Progression isn't too great at healing disease. However, we do know that enough Breaths(I forget the amount) can cure all diseases, as we saw with Vienna. The question is that do these diseases return after the breath is taken away. Because otherwise, doctors could theoretically treat every disease just by infusing someone with a few hundred breaths, then taking them back a few seconds later.

[Treamayne]

1 hour ago, The Stick said:

Another thing I have been considering at length is if this would be the end of all disease. We know Progression isn't too great at healing disease. However, we do know that enough Breaths(I forget the amount) can cure all diseases, as we saw with Vienna. The question is that do these diseases return after the breath is taken away. Because otherwise, doctors could theoretically treat every disease just by infusing someone with a few hundred breaths, then taking them back a few seconds later.

Breath does not heal disease - it helps your immune system fight disease, and if you have enough BioChroma, prevents you from contracting it in the first place. 

Warbreaker Annotations to Ch 41:

Spoiler

Vivenna, Sick and Her Mind Cloudy, Gets Turned Away by the Restaurant Keeper

One of the ways I decided to make Vivenna’s sections here work better was by enhancing the fuzziness of her mind. By giving her this sense of numbness, I hope to indicate that something is not right with her.

It’s common for someone who suddenly becomes a Drab to get sick almost immediately. For a time, her immune system was magically enhanced and warded, in a way, to keep her from becoming ill. With that removed suddenly, sickness can strike. She hasn’t built up immunities to the sicknesses going around, and by becoming a Drab, her immune system suddenly works far worse than that of other people.

These things combined made her come down with something pretty nasty the very day she put away her Breath. This would have killed her, eventually, if she hadn’t done something about it. She would have grown so dizzy and confused that she wouldn’t have even been able to walk.

By sending men to find her, Denth saved her life.

Anyway, I feel that these scenes work much better now. We can look at Vivenna’s time on the streets in the same surreal sense that she does. They happened in the past, in a strange dream state. In that way, they can seem much longer than just two chapters and a couple of weeks.

Note: Lemex Annotations (Spoilers):

Spoiler

Ch 10 Annotations:

In a lot of ways, I imagined Denth as the anti-Kelsier. Glib, smart, and hired to do impossible tasks. Only in this book he works for the wrong team. In this scene in particular, he was doing his best to nudge Vivenna to give him the Breaths. His job was only to hold her, to keep her captive and in reserve just in case the plots with Siri failed. That way, there would be a second princess to use in the plots. He was assigned to work for Lemex originally just to give him an in with the Idrians in the city, so that he could rile them up to incite the war further. But when he found that Vivenna was coming, he realized that she would be a much better pawn, and so he poisoned Lemex and took her instead. His employers were very happy to have a backup princess.

So, anyway, Lemex’s Breaths were secondary. Denth wanted them, but he knew that the most important thing to do here was get Vivenna to trust him. So he tried to subtly manipulate her into giving them to him. (He intentionally acted reluctant to take them in order to goad her.)

Ch 19 Annotations:

However, what Denth is doing here is using Vivenna to help continue plots he has long had in motion. He’s lying when he says that he doesn’t know what Lemex was involved in and has only seen pieces. In truth, Lemex was doing what Denth wanted him to—they were Denth’s plans all along.

However, Lemex was beginning to grow more reticent, and Denth was having more trouble manipulating him. Another good reason for the poisoning. (And it took a lot of poison to off someone with that much Breath.)

 

Edited March 27 by Treamayne
Examples

[alder24]

18 hours ago, The Stick said:

Another thing I have been considering at length is if this would be the end of all disease. We know Progression isn't too great at healing disease. However, we do know that enough Breaths(I forget the amount) can cure all diseases, as we saw with Vienna. The question is that do these diseases return after the breath is taken away. Because otherwise, doctors could theoretically treat every disease just by infusing someone with a few hundred breaths, then taking them back a few seconds later.

Buying hundreds of Breaths to get rid of an illness seems like a very expensive thing. Sure they might get cheaper in the future, especially if you can exchange investiture, but buying/borrowing an unkeyed Goldmind or a Progression Fabrial seems like a much cheaper alternative.

[The Stick]

Yeah, you are right that Good minds would be better, but I thought Progression wasn't very good at diseases.

[Trusk'our]

13 minutes ago, The Stick said:

Yeah, you are right that Good minds would be better, but I thought Progression wasn't very good at diseases.

I think that's gold Feruchemy that doesn't deal well with sickness, actually. 

Progression is pretty capable of dealing with disease, perhaps because more Investiture is generally used with it.