Gaming the System in Forging

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Also, to my understanding, we've never seen what happens when two separate forges are working against each other, so we don't really know if forging the lie into the building would prevent a forger from making an exception. That would be fun to find out, though.

It's a separate system, but Shai can't forge the bloodsealed door.

 

On the other hand, you can definitely combine multiple seals for greater effect.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan]

From what I know of the magics, she could have Forged it, but the blood-ward seemed to operate like a deadman switch in that I think the Bloodsealer would have known if it was tampered with/wiped out of existence.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

From what I know of the magics, she could have Forged it, but the blood-ward seemed to operate like a deadman switch in that I think the Bloodsealer would have known if it was tampered with/wiped out of existence.

It wasn't to escape, just to pretty up the place.

Gaotona looked across her chamber and its fine furniture that had been carved and polished. Its marble floor with silver inlay, the crackling hearth and small chandelier. A fine rug—it had once been a bed quilt with holes in it—covered the floor. The stained glass window sparkled on the right wall, lighting the beautiful mural.

The only thing that retained its original form was the door, thick but unremarkable. She couldn’t Forge that, not with that Bloodseal set into it.

[Kurkistan]

Ah, I had forgotten. Thank you. That quote does seem to suggest a more magical reason why she couldn't Forge it, but I would note that there still exists the possibility that the Bloodsealing wasn't "directly" interfering with Forging. An unlikely possibility and not one I subscribe to at the moment, but still there.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Ah, I had forgotten. Thank you. That quote does seem to suggest a more magical reason why she couldn't Forge it, but I would note that there still exists the possibility that the Bloodsealing wasn't "directly" interfering with Forging. An unlikely possibility and not one I subscribe to at the moment, but still there.

I admit it could be that she doesn't know enough about bloodsealing to plausibly change anything... though it's more probable that this is one of those 'you can only put in so much investiture' situations.

Edited June 27, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Kurkistan]

Forging is a bit unknown to me in terms of how much Investiture it involves. On the one hand, it's a very flexible system. On the other, it's exceptionally wimpy and only "flexible" within certain highly restrictive bounds. Either way, if we can stuff 1,000 Breaths into a sword, I think we could fit two stamps on a door.

 

In that case, I think Shai may be thinking of the Bloodseal as a variety of normal stamp (what with her mistaken belief that they're the same system), which could indicate that you are only allowed to have one stamp on an object at a time in real Forging.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

In that case, I think Shai may be thinking of the Bloodseal as a variety of normal stamp (what with her mistaken belief that they're the same system), which could indicate that you are only allowed to have one stamp on an object at a time in real Forging.

Nah, she puts three stamps on the wall, and multiple stamps on the desk as well.  Along with the billion-and-one stamps she uses for her essence marks, of course.

[Kurkistan]

But aren't those all "all together now" stamps that work towards the same end goal, a singular change to the object? Though I now realize I didn't specify, I was trying to talk about Forging's that "conflict" with each other, or a the very least were not designed from the beginning to work together.

[Kurkistan]

@Thought: Okay, as you said, we're winding down, so I'll try to be brief so we can finish up (relatively) quickly.
 
Romanticism: I know you like your big fancy words, Thought, but you really have to admit that you're reaching here. Yes, technically Realmatics could be based on the Power of Love or some such, but it probably isn't, and that comment was contextualized by an entire book (an entire set of books, if you take all the Cosmere books together) that are fairly scientific in tone whenever it comes down to the bare-bones of the magic systems.
 
Guts: Experts in the relative sense, with our gut calls worth more than the results of flipping a coin.
 
"Meant to be": Or it was referring to its still-present Cognitive concepiton as stained glass, not an active desire to go from being regular glass to being stained (since it does and always has considered itself stained glass). As I've said.
 
Passivity: If you have a problem with "passivity", then how about "reactive" or "unyeilding"? The key is that it won't go out and mow the lawn itself, but it will certainly yell at the neighbor kid if he does it wrong.
 
"And": Or
 
This brevity isn't going to last, is it?
 

You misunderstand my point. I'm saying it wouldn't have been recorded by the Emperor's soul at all, because nothing was aware of it. Not the Emperor personally, not his cognitive aspect, not his grandmother thrice removed. It's like an archeologist who find a shard of pottery: nothing will tell him about the history of that pottery, but he knows that something created it, and he can start to deduce certain things about it. The Emperor's soul has been wiped clean, so Shai's job is to put a new shard of pottery in the same place and make certain that an archeologist who sees it would make the same deductions as with the original.
 
The problem with the historical record model is that it'll be impossible to forge believably. There would simply be too many details that Shai has no way of knowing, if specifics are truly necessary, and there'd be no way to fit all that information into a single carved stamp. To be practical, forging has to work at a generalized level. Again, Shai doesn't have to identify every brushstroke in the mural, even the critical ones. She has to identity how those brushstrokes were chosen to be made.
 
You brought up the door to the Emperor's chamber that Shai forges and breaks through. That's a wonderful example of why historical facts are less important to a forge than the processes behind them. Shai used the same stamp to rot the door as she used on her bed. Under what insanity could we suppose that the door and bed frame had a similar history? If Gatona's soul could let Shai test the emperor's soul on his because he was familiar with the Emperor's soul, how familiar should a door be with a bed? The stamp didn't take long, true, but since every relevant historical fact was wrong, it shouldn't have taken at all. Unless its the processes, not the specifics, that are important.

 
While it's unclear exactly what Shai's stamps were comparing against (Ashraven's soul, his bodies soul, the souls of those who knew him?) we do know that Ashraven's soul wasn't "wiped clean"; at worst it's inaccessible, having "passed on", but there is an afterlife in the Cosmere, so destroying a bit of gray matter won't destroy a soul in actuality.
 
You're quite a one to talk about the level of detail required being too much . Shai herself says that she's going for the details, when talking to Gaotona, and just hopes to get enough of them right that it'll stick. So sure, Forgeries work on a generalized level, but their basic components are rather specific.
 
The implausibility was such that the stamp would only have held for a few seconds, as opposed to holding into perpetuity. I'd say that's enough of a dividing line. Both the door and the bed were wooden objects theoretically susceptible to insects, so that's enough to get the foot in the door, I think.
 

Given what we know about the realms, the Cognitive aspect should be able to rearrange the Physical without needing to resort to extra power. To illustrate, if Jasnah's physical aspect travels across the physical realm from Roshar to Sel, we'd well expect that her cognitive aspect likewise travels across the cognitive realm from Roshar-Shadesmar to Sel-Shadesmar. Mere movement from point A to B is clearly not the sort of change you're referencing, but it illustrates that there is a direct connection between the two realms. That is, Jasnah doesn't have to worry about the force to propel her physical aspect as separate from the force needed to propel her cognitive aspect. Move one, and the other moves, like a spanreed. If one turns, the other turns. If I rearrange your physical face, your cognitive face will eventually be rearranged to match. Yes? Even if we quibble about the time it takes for those changes to become incorporated, the fact that they'll be incorporated, without the addition of shardic power, is agreed upon, right? So the inverse should be true: if I rearrange your cognitive face, your physical face should get rearranged, too. If I neuter your cognitive aspect, your physical aspect should get neutered, too. We have no reason at present to believe that change is limited to one direction naturally.

 
We have every reason to believe that change is limited to one direction naturally. People who get their arms chopped off or die of infectious diseases can still be Healed back to perfect health. Their Cognitive aspects do nothing to help them without magic, though. The case you cite with Jasnah necessarily involves the use of magic. I'm fine with Physical changes bleeding into the Cognitive, with time (though it could still be a primarily Cog-Cog interaction, with the Cognitive perception of different locations being what does the trick) but that gives us no reason to think that they are glued together.
 
What you're saying is as if claiming that a man pushing a boulder has the man and the boulder move the same way, so obviously the man must move when the boulder does.
 

As for Sanderson's note, amusingly that supports my original supposition, that amputation via forgery is unlikely to take. It'd be moving you away from how you know yourself.

 
Or Forgery can change Cognitive aspects with relative ease, as I've held all along.
 

Also, it looks like there are two slightly different things in action here. We know that the cognitive aspect is in part determined by how other people view things (stated by Shai without even the slightest reservation). Being injured affects how other people view you, thereby affecting your cognitive aspect. But that doesn't preclude healing, either. Therefore, we can separate the cognitive identity into two closely related (and often overlapping) concepts for this in particular: how you actually are, and how you believe yourself to be. For someone like Sazed, these two have merged, which is why "how he is" (a eunuch) can't be healed: it's the same as "how he believes himself to be." But again, we are getting at desires here. "Knowing yourself" to be something that you actually aren't? That's a very strong desire, not an identity. Or, perhaps we might say, a very strong desire for a no longer accurate identity. But it's the desire that's important.
 
The point about the Emperor is that identity isn't enough. Which we seem to agree on, until you start making arguments against desire.

 
This is just such a large departure from our current models of Realmatics. Two Cognitive aspsects? When everything we know of says it's just one? Why? Why can we not say that Cognitive aspects simply have inertia, that "how others see you" and even "how you see yourself" simply enacts gradual change upon a singular Cognitive aspect? If you have Crazy Joe who thinks (a perfectly intact) Bill has only one arm, do we really need to split off a bit of Bill's Cognitive aspect to account for this? Or can we just leave that perception nested into Joe's thoughts, with Bill's Cognitive aspect acknowledging and shrugging it off?
 

Clearly, that's not all that's needed, elsewise Shai wouldn't need to know the history and nature of an object in order to forge it. To forge her original prison, for example, she needed to know the nature of the rocks so she could know where they might have been mined (the Laio quarry for the grindstone, for example). If all she needed to know was that it was grindstone, for example, why couldn't she have then just said that someone accidentally installed anthracite in its place instead? The nature of the grindstone, it seems, extends more than to just the fact that it's grindstone. Its origin is part of its identity. If Shai has to know its nature to get the forge to work, then that information has to be represented in the forge itself somehow. Shai couldn't forge the grindstone to be very poor quality, little better than dirt, for example, without knowing where it was mined, and in turn using that knowledge in the forge.
 
It seems, at least, that you're discounting all the research that Shai's very clear she has to have.

 
I'd like to note that you're rather misinterpreting the scope of my "Forms" comment. That was specifically in reply to your point about needing to invent "an entire history" for a bar of gold, instead of it being relatively easy.
 
All that aside, though: I'm perfectly fine with having to know histories (and core identities...) for target objects, to varying degrees. Remember that Shai was trying very implausible and very fundamental changes to her prison's walls: she needed the oomph of accurate and plausible history on several levels. "The universe" will accept a bar of gold being adulterated relatively easily, but will need a darn good explanation for why this Forger's cell was made out of coal.
 

The reality that all these facts must be known and included should make us realize that there is far more than a single "someone took care of it" command involved. But if we both agree that the forging process is still largely procedural, then we must conclude that the facts (and lies) themselves aren't key (as that gets away from procedural generation), but rather guides. You have to know the past so you know how the narrative flows, so you can know where and how to nudge it in the desired direction.
 
A reasonable objection at this point would be that my proposed model (that process is more important than events) seems to discount events as well. However, my model accounts for the need to know history because the history is needed to determine the process, and so gets represented in the process. It's not important to know, for example, that the Emperor skinned his knee when he was five, but rather the narrative flow of how that affected him. Without knowing the Emperor's own narrative flows, Shai has to look at the events and from those deduce the flow, much like a geologist might look at sediment and deduce from it the flow of water that created it.

 
I forget exactly why I ought to be disagreeing with a "narrative flow" model. Would you care to remind me? You discount changing specific events as important, I suppose, but the why eludes me. I see it as entirely natural that you would reshape an object's "narrative flow" by changing specific facts about its past to change the flow of its narrative.
 

Far too implausible to ever come close to thinking about working. The human mind simply doesn't work that way: we're all about shifting unimportant details out of our conscious experience. If something's been unimportant the last 100 times you've checked, it doesn't matter if your life is on the line, your mind wont think it's important that 101st time. The chain knows no one is going to pay that close and consistent attention: the forge would evaporate before it even had a chance to take hold.
 
Also, to my understanding, we've never seen what happens when two separate forges are working against each other, so we don't really know if forging the lie into the building would prevent a forger from making an exception. That would be fun to find out, though.

 
Really, "far too implausible"? You have people who took the time to build a cell out of 44 different kinds of stone all backed up by a cage of some (presumably very rare) unForgeable metal, but it's implausible for them to be sure to check that the thing doesn't have prisoner-sized hole in it?
 
I think you may have misread me, but I'm not talking about Forging a wall/chain such that it was quality-checked so religiously. Do this in real life with real people as a matter of course. You don't need to pay constant attention: Check Forger-bound walls/chains when you first get them, then check them again when you're about to use them to contain a Forger, then check them again when you put them on. Easy as pie. Do this in real life as a matter of course and you simply win, if Forging holds to the Thought Model.
 
To reiterate, I'm not sure where you're getting "dueling Forgers" from my post, but it's not there on purpose.
 

She clearly said it was fragile, not broken. Consider how someone can lay on a bed of nails while being punctured by a single nail. A fragile bed could easily support someone when they distribute their weight while not being able to support someone (a larger someone, no less) when they jump on it. That's only a hair trigger if we're talking about a brace of coneys (okay, sorry, bad pun). The key is that the objects are strong enough for normal use, but not strong enough to take intense abuse. We don't see Shai ever forging something in a way that renders it actually useless, just close.

 
You're reaching here, Thought. A bed that collapses into a pit in the when you look at it wrong is not a functional bed in any reasonable sense of the word. We also have the rotten door to the Emperor's personal chambers (Purpose: Keep people out) that can be kicked down by a diminutive scholar. Despite the Forging not sticking, it did hold for a moment, which shouldn't happen at all for a "turn this into dust" type of stamp.
 
EDIT: Also, the bed was very rickety: Just before Zu comes in, Shai is exhausted and we get this snippet:
 
"If she could just sleep for a few hours. Just a few . . .
No. I can’t use the bed anyway.
Curling up on the floor sounded wonderful, however."

 

So even bitsy little Shai couldn't have used the bed safely. If she had intentionally Forged it to the point of being technically usable, but fragile in the case of ill-use, then she would have known that she'd be perfectly safe using it normally. That safety would be a necessary part of the magic system. So this is more of a case of a glass jaw that shatters when you try to swallow, not just when you get punched.

 

EDIT 2: I think this might actually mean that I "win". Huh.   
 

Good point about the bed frame (though mostly an aside, as this gives evidence that things don't have to be forged in whole, which gets back to resealers working on a body apart from a person). But it's very explicit that she just made the frame fragile. You might have a glass jaw, doesn't mean you can't eat with it.

 
Actually, I'd just say the frame is distinct from the mattress. They are easily separable in both the physical and mental sense.
 

Oh, it's easy to justify, given that no murder ever happened. As described in the book, the objects were still perfectly useable. Having cancer isn't the same as being dead, having rot isn't the same a bed being murdered. Your arguments just don't fit with the text.

 
"Perfectly usable". Yeah. 
 

Also, regarding the mattress: what's more probable, that Shai decided to cut through it with guards in the room watching her, thereby running a high risk of exposure (cutting a mattress ain't quiet, it ain't easy, and it ain't subtle), because she couldn't be bothered to forge it, or she knew that the safe, forge route wasn't an option? Unfortunately, your explanation is highly implausible.

 
"Highly implausible". That's a bit unnice.  Wait, why couldn't she have theoretically Forged the mattress? After all, the stuffing didn't all fall out into the pit in the floor, and a very careful user could have used it as a mattress, so it still had its "purpose".
 
Also, it's not a modern box spring. It's probably linen with some stuffing, and she clearly got away with cutting it, so it couldn't have been too loud.
 

No one notices things that aren't noticeable. The success of a lot of Shai's forgeries, both mundane and magical, seems to be summed up right there.

 
I'll bring your attention back to pit-floor-cell and all-one-rock-which-rock-is-coal-Forger-cell. That will not happen. It is noticeable. I'm refuse to believe that anyone is that incompetent, and so any model of Forgery which demands that a highly security-conscious organization with nearly infinite resources--who knows they'll be holding a Forger--be so insanely and destructively unobservant is unacceptable to me.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

So wait, you're saying forgery healing is "change the cognitive aspect of the arm to say 'yo I am healed'"?

[Kurkistan]

So wait, you're saying forgery healing is "change the cognitive aspect of the arm to say 'yo I am healed'"?

 

Yes and no.

 

No in the case where it's someone who lost their arm relatively recently, whose Cognitive aspect still includes them having both arms. In that case, you can just do some Physical/Spiritual stuff and mostly leave the Cognitive alone.

 

Yes in the case where you can only do it temporarily, though it's more "yo, given my artificial state of health which includes having two arms, I'm 'healed' due to magical circumstances" than "yo I'm healed" since the amputee's sense of what it is to be "healed" does not naturally include the second arm. Temporary Resealing goes "against the grain" so far as the real Cognitive aspect of the target goes, while the permanent variety is in line with it.

 

So far as changing the Cognitive aspect (and pouring on the juice to make it so, as well as some changes to the Spiritual as well), it's also a tad more complicated than that, at least by my model. It's not really a change, more a temporary overlay or reinterpretation of the existing Cognitive aspect whose existence is acknowledged to be an unnatural imposition. Which imposition is then burned off over time due to the will of living beings to self-actualize their identities. Yeah, I have a thread. It was long.

 

Resealing could be slightly different from regular Forging, theoretically, but, if it is just Forging, then that's how I think it'll work.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Thought]

*Kurk, “Romanticism” doesn’t mean “Power of Love.” Romanticism was an intellectual movement that emphasized emotion as a valid means of experiencing the world. If you give weight to anyone’s gut reaction, you’re engaging in a romantic mindset. Also, it held to the idea that truth might be subjective. Or, in other words, that a window isn’t just a window, it’s how people think about and perceive windows.

Just moments after Shai thinks she might be being too emotion, she engages in more romantic perspectives as she tries to describe forging to Gatona.

“Meant to be” is a particular verb tense called the subjunctive. This tense used to represent unrealities. If the stained glass aspect was part of the window’s cognitive reality, then it would be inappropriate to apply the subjunctive tense. Since the subjunctive was used, we know it represents an unreality. Or, in other words, a wish, a hope, a desire, a fear, a prediction about the future, etc.

As for the directionality of change, you’re suggestion goes against our prior conversation about feruchemical shuttling. Store an attribute, and a physical gets stored in a non-physical realm. Tap it, and the attribute in the non-physical realm affects the physical realm. Because we know that feruchemy doesn’t draw from a shard, and that it’s end neutral, if magic is needed to transfer an effect from one realm to another, feruchemy should be end-negative, because it would be forced to expend some of the user’s power to fuel the transference.

Forgery uses power to affect the cognitive aspect of something, and then the nature of the realms takes over for making the cognitive affect the physical. If this is not true, then Feruchemy, too, would have to use power to transfer an attribute back to the individual’s present physical state. To think that change is limited to one direction naturally… why, that’s just physicocentrism!

As for why you should be disagreeing with my narrative flow model, you really shouldn’t be, given that I’m right.

But presumably you’re asking why we have opposite sides on the matter? Basically, my stance is that Shai has to get the narrative flow right, and that the specifics are merely the rocks and shores that Shai can use to figure out that flow. That there is a flow, a movement, a momentum, means that there will be a force pressing against something that’s trying to swim upstream. Say, someone attempting to remove an arm. That’s very against the current.

In turn, your stance has been that there’s no current for a forging to go against. It’s silly, I know. I can understand why you’d feel like you should agree with me instead.

I discount the changing of a specific event as important because it’s secondary. In making a normal forgery, Shai is essentially trying to change the course of a river. The boulder she throws into the river is entirely forgettable: how that boulder changes the flow of that river, that’s what’s important. For the emperor, she’s basically trying to create a river that flows in a similar enough pattern to the original for it to be mistaken as the same thing. Becoming Emperor is like identifying that there’s a bend in the river: not that useful, until you can figure out if the river bends to the left or right.

This gets back to your original idea about amputation. You proposed a simple event (a guillotine that could have cut off your hand and, in a forged reality, did). My objection is that the event is meaningless outside the context of the river. You can’t throw in a pebble and expect the river to start flowing uphill.

The “dueling forgers” bit is the logical extension of your supposition. Even if an imperial forger could make it so that the cell endured a high degree of care, what happens with the imprisoned forger applies a counter-stamp saying that someone was careless and mistakes were made? It’s largely a side issue, since we don’t know what would happen, but it’s hasty to say that your solution to a forger escaping is foolproof when we don’t know how stamps interact.

As for Shai not being able to use the bed: misdirection is a key element of a con. Calling attention to the thing you want someone to ignore is a really bad idea. Perhaps the guards wouldn’t notice that the incredibly solid, perfectly comfortable and silent bed that Shai’s been sleeping on for the last few months is suddenly making an awful lot of creaks and groans. But people notice things that are unusual.

Also, it’s hard for someone to crash through the bed with her on it. Especially if she’d like to not fall to the storage room below with them. Thus, Shai has to keep herself off the bed in order to use it as part of her trap. Being caught asleep on it would really defeat the purpose of everything.

Additionally, she cut the mattress. Even if the bedframe was still useable, what she’s done to the mattress might have taken it beyond that threshold (which was sort of my point about the mattress).

The fact that Shai can’t use the bed fits with both the supposition that the bed would collapse under her weight and the supposition that using it would reveal her hand.

As for the mattress specifically, the question is quite simple: why didn’t she forge it instead of cutting? Even though she got away with it, why take the chance? Given that cutting appears to be the risker of the two methods, it’s odd that she went with it. Assuming that she’s a rational actor, we must suppose that she had a reason to not forge it.

Returning to the cell, even Shai indicates she didn’t think she could have actually escaped. So the fact that she blusters and claims that she can, that shouldn’t be taken as actual evidence of ability or how the magic system works. As for the floor, really? How many times do you test the floor under your bed? When you go to a hotel, how many times do you test the floor under those beds? I can find no evidence to suggest that prison guards check the floor under the beds before putting a new prisoner in a cell.

Ultimately it’s not so much a question of what you find acceptable or unacceptable. That’s just an appeal to emotion. Where the evidence leads, that’s where I’ll go.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Thought

[Kurkistan]

Kurk, “Romanticism” doesn’t mean “Power of Love.” Romanticism was an intellectual movement that emphasized emotion as a valid means of experiencing the world. If you give weight to anyone’s gut reaction, you’re engaging in a romantic mindset. Also, it held to the idea that truth might be subjective. Or, in other words, that a window isn’t just a window, it’s how people think about and perceive windows.

Just moments after Shai thinks she might be being too emotion, she engages in more romantic perspectives as she tries to describe forging to Gatona.

 

Suffice it to say that I believe the intended and reasonable reading of that section is one of discounting "romantic" notions in favor of more empirical approaches; and also I would note that nature of explanations to laymen very rarely tends to most accurately reflect the true workings of complex systems in either form or content.

 

As for the directionality of change, you’re suggestion goes against our prior conversation about feruchemical shuttling. Store an attribute, and a physical gets stored in a non-physical realm. Tap it, and the attribute in the non-physical realm affects the physical realm. Because we know that feruchemy doesn’t draw from a shard, and that it’s end neutral, if magic is needed to transfer an effect from one realm to another, feruchemy should be end-negative, because it would be forced to expend some of the user’s power to fuel the transference.

Forgery uses power to affect the cognitive aspect of something, and then the nature of the realms takes over for making the cognitive affect the physical. If this is not true, then Feruchemy, too, would have to use power to transfer an attribute back to the individual’s present physical state. To think that change is limited to one direction naturally… why, that’s just physicocentrism!

 

Feruchemy is magic and thus necessarily involves unnatural goings on and interactions. Also, who's to say that the transfer of Investiture is at all entropic? If it is not, as I think likely, then no power need be expended to fuel magical transfers in Feruchemy. This flows to counter your claims that Forgery is thus necessarily a "natural" consequence of changing Cognitive aspects.

 

As for why you should be disagreeing with my narrative flow model, you really shouldn’t be, given that I’m right.

But presumably you’re asking why we have opposite sides on the matter? Basically, my stance is that Shai has to get the narrative flow right, and that the specifics are merely the rocks and shores that Shai can use to figure out that flow. That there is a flow, a movement, a momentum, means that there will be a force pressing against something that’s trying to swim upstream. Say, someone attempting to remove an arm. That’s very against the current.

In turn, your stance has been that there’s no current for a forging to go against. It’s silly, I know. I can understand why you’d feel like you should agree with me instead.

I discount the changing of a specific event as important because it’s secondary. In making a normal forgery, Shai is essentially trying to change the course of a river. The boulder she throws into the river is entirely forgettable: how that boulder changes the flow of that river, that’s what’s important. For the emperor, she’s basically trying to create a river that flows in a similar enough pattern to the original for it to be mistaken as the same thing. Becoming Emperor is like identifying that there’s a bend in the river: not that useful, until you can figure out if the river bends to the left or right.

This gets back to your original idea about amputation. You proposed a simple event (a guillotine that could have cut off your hand and, in a forged reality, did). My objection is that the event is meaningless outside the context of the river. You can’t throw in a pebble and expect the river to start flowing uphill.

 

I am curious as to what exactly the driving force of this "river" is for you. The only orienting force that springs naturally to my mind is the flow of time: the effects of events farther in an object's past necessarily impact what happens "downstream" of them, and cannot impact anything "up stream". The flow, then, at least for me, is one through time from event to event, these events shaping what occurs farther downstream.

 

Plausibility, then, is merely asking if this particular river could have flowed some other way if it's course had been affected in certain ways by a certain set of events. Forgeries, then, do not so much battle the "flow" of what the river looks like before the Forgery, as they contest with conceptions about the plausibility of certain interpretations as to how its flow could have been different given a different past.

 

Forging the Emperor, then, is not a matter of fighting the "flow" (a flow from what towards where, I must ask, if not time?) of what people think he looked like as it is ensuring that the events shaping the course of the riverbed you craft fit into his real and plausible past. Shai could have Forged an Ashraven with a radically different personality, had she invented plausible changes in his past. She did not, however, and her specific concerns with matching his "shape" so specifically came from her trying to mimic a known entity, rather than alter it.

 

The strength of the "narrative flow", then, is not just "how things are now"--as we have seen how very drastically those can be changed--but instead the difficulty of plausibly arguing that the course of a river could have changed in certain ways due to certain alterations in its bed. 

 

The “dueling forgers” bit is the logical extension of your supposition. Even if an imperial forger could make it so that the cell endured a high degree of care, what happens with the imprisoned forger applies a counter-stamp saying that someone was careless and mistakes were made? It’s largely a side issue, since we don’t know what would happen, but it’s hasty to say that your solution to a forger escaping is foolproof when we don’t know how stamps interact.

 

I am deeply confused by your continued misinterpretation of what I mean by all of this. I do not care about some hypothetical Imperial Forger. This is not about the interaction of stamps. This is about establishing the nature of the world in actuality. It is KNOWN that people do not adulterate lead with gold, that chains are not made of soap. No amount of Forgery can contravene these simple truths of the world that Shai lives in, and so she cannot Forge that it be so.

 

If it is similarly KNOWN that the Rose Empire takes near-perfect and reliable precautions at all times against the possibility of error in the physical circumstances of their holding of Forgers, then it will be as impossible for Shai to Forge her chains into having a weak link as it would have been for her to Forge them into soap. This KNOWING can be done with relatively easy real-world action. It is not done in the Rose Empire. Therefore, there is a reason it is not done, given the desire of the Rose Empire to hold Forgers. That reason is most plausibly that it cannot be done.

 

Ultimately it’s not so much a question of what you find acceptable or unacceptable. That’s just an appeal to emotion. Where the evidence leads, that’s where I’ll go.

 

You dismiss my incredulity that the existence of such a method against Forgery would not be exploited by calling it an "appeal to emotion". Perhaps it is. The same emotion I would feel if someone told me that no one ever uses money to bribe people, or that Breaths are always given up willingly in the true sense of the word.

 

Especially in terms of TES and its magic as an authored work--specifically from an author who takes great care to consider the authentic ramifications of his magics--I will still declare that any model of Forgery which demands that our antagonists be so incomprehensibly dense as this is unacceptable. I have thought of this in a matter of hours, as an aside in a relatively low-key debate focusing on other issues. It would be nearly criminal for Brandon's worldbuilding to include this kind of loophole without our intelligent, resourceful, knowledgeable, and competent antagonists having taken advantage of it.

 

As for Shai not being able to use the bed: misdirection is a key element of a con. Calling attention to the thing you want someone to ignore is a really bad idea. Perhaps the guards wouldn’t notice that the incredibly solid, perfectly comfortable and silent bed that Shai’s been sleeping on for the last few months is suddenly making an awful lot of creaks and groans. But people notice things that are unusual.

Also, it’s hard for someone to crash through the bed with her on it. Especially if she’d like to not fall to the storage room below with them. Thus, Shai has to keep herself off the bed in order to use it as part of her trap. Being caught asleep on it would really defeat the purpose of everything.

Additionally, she cut the mattress. Even if the bedframe was still useable, what she’s done to the mattress might have taken it beyond that threshold (which was sort of my point about the mattress).

The fact that Shai can’t use the bed fits with both the supposition that the bed would collapse under her weight and the supposition that using it would reveal her hand.

 

Perhaps it's needless to say, but I find this interpretation unpersuasive.

 

Will you, at the very least, acknowledge that your interpretation is unnatural in a naive reading of the text? If the rest of your theory is perfectly sound, and the only plausible explanation 100 scholars can produce in 100 days is the Thought Model, then perhaps we can accept such a. . .twisty explanation. But it is not one that comes naturally to unbiased reader; under your model, Shai's bed is a challenge to be explained in light of prevailing theories, not an illumination of the nature of Forgery.

 

As for the mattress specifically, the question is quite simple: why didn’t she forge it instead of cutting? Even though she got away with it, why take the chance? Given that cutting appears to be the risker of the two methods, it’s odd that she went with it. Assuming that she’s a rational actor, we must suppose that she had a reason to not forge it.

 

Because Forging takes time and effort and thought and she had a knife? In fact, what plausible history besides "someone cut it with a knife" could you even invent to explain a mattress being in such a state?

 

Also, the impression one (or at least this one) receives from the reading is that it was cut so that it would fit through the pit in the floor after the bed frame collapsed out from under it: not so that it would itself collapse. If the frame had remained intact, so would the mattress, and so the integrity of the bed as a whole (if you even take the mattress and frame to be one object) was not compromised "beyond the breaking point" by Shai's mattress-cutting.

 

Returning to the cell, even Shai indicates she didn’t think she could have actually escaped. So the fact that she blusters and claims that she can, that shouldn’t be taken as actual evidence of ability or how the magic system works. As for the floor, really? How many times do you test the floor under your bed? When you go to a hotel, how many times do you test the floor under those beds? I can find no evidence to suggest that prison guards check the floor under the beds before putting a new prisoner in a cell.

 

She couldn't have escaped given her tools and knowledge, and particularly given her inability to get through the Ralkalest, but it is abundantly clear throughout the narrative that the walls of her cell--Ralkalest aside--could have been Forged by a Forger with the right stamps and information.

 

I can't say I've held captives before, but I do hope I'd be one such as to check to make sure there wasn't a built-in escape hatch in their cell if I did. It seems the sensible thing.

 

Ultimately it’s not so much a question of what you find acceptable or unacceptable. That’s just an appeal to emotion. Where the evidence leads, that’s where I’ll go.

 

Thought, you are now the Rose Emperor: Unlimited resources and manpower are yours to command. I give you the charge of holding an uncooperative Forger--with full access to soulstone, carving tools, and historical information--for a period of no less than a year. Given your unrivaled knowledge of the true nature of Forgery and its magics, will you not know that if you merely quintuple check the means used to hold your Forger as a matter of course, as a matter of policy, then escape will be impossible? Given that knowledge, would you not do so?

 

The Rose Empire does not do so, and so the evidence tells us that they could not. Thus, any model of Forgery which allows them to have done so is simply not accurate.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Thought]

I am deeply confused by your continued misinterpretation of what I mean by all of this. I do not care about some hypothetical Imperial Forger. This is not about the interaction of stamps. This is about establishing the nature of the world in actuality. It is KNOWN that people do not adulterate lead with gold, that chains are not made of soap. No amount of Forgery can contravene these simple truths of the world that Shai lives in, and so she cannot Forge that it be so.

 

I wanted to respond to this sooner rather than later, since the error was mine. Confused by your confusion, I went back to read this very particular chain of exchanges. I see I had assumed you were being more fool-proof than you were, apparently. When you said that that the Emperor would have an unbreakable rule made that things are checked meticulously, and then when you reiterated that sentiment when I noted that familiarity breeds indifference, I had assumed you were trying to convey that there was a magical force behind that dictate. Aka, forging. I totally read forging into your comments, but see that you didn't mean them that way. However, now that I see that I was in error, my original, off-handed comment will suffice: familiarity breeds indifference.

 

It doesn't matter if your the Rose Emperor or the Lord Ruler. People don't work that way, and as long as you rely on people, a forger can take advantage of that fact. This is why surgical sponges get left in people, or typos left in a book.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Thought

[Kurkistan]

Like the secret of the Atium cache never getting out?

 

Ah, I see. I don't think you need magic for consistency, though.

 

Familiarity breeds indifference, true, but only to a degree. You might leave a surgical sponge in, but you're still going to sew the wound shut. You might leave typos, but not leave the book in the wrong language. My reply was a simple reaffirmation because you can and will emphasize the importance of doing something right if the stakes are high enough. It is especially important to judge the severity of these various mistakes, and the degree to which they are allowable. I'm not saying that leaving sponges in is exactly praiseworthy, but "it can happen", while leaving someone's heart to bask in the morning sunshine or sewing the patient up with a Snickers inside does not fall under that category of plausibility.

 

Imprisoning a Forger without taking the precautions I've outlined is just missing the point: to put it more strongly, it is just about pointless. TLR's Obligators kept the caches and Atium a secret because that was the bare minimum that they needed to do in order for their work to have any meaning at all. Just so, there is no point to imprisoning a Forger without these precautions, especially for any length of time. That's the kind of thing that sets "did the job well enough to still say 'we did it'" as the baseline, with the fluctuations of variable indifference all ranging far above and never below.

 

Even if this cannot be impressed on chain-checkers on the lower levels, those in authority can certainly recognize and enforce this expectation. Whereas Gaotona is all sanguine and "oh, you can just break out of anywhere we tried to hold you", he could instead of been "oh, you'll be held, if the men who checked the chains value their lives. . ." or something slightly less evil, but equally effective. Or the conspiritors could have taken an afternoon and checked the chains on their one hope of political (if not also physical) survival themselves.

 

--

 

Really though, despite the fact that I think you could routinely and reliably imprison Forgers with relative ease under such a policy, "familiarity breeds indifference" and its challenges never actually enter the picture in the circumstances we've been talking about.

 

How often do you really imprison a Forger? Once or twice a year? Even that? Let's say they get half a dozen Forgers every year, just for the sake of making it a bit more challenging. Is that really routine? Recall that everyone knows that rigorous checking of every aspect of the Forgers' confinement (including the floors' integrity. . .) is strictly necessary to imprison them. Otherwise it's practically a waste of time. It's not a case of somewhat justifiable indifference because "only 1 in a 1000 chains that we have are actually flawed", it's "I need to triple check that this chain is not flawed, or else it will be by the time the Forger is done with it." You won't get "overworked and underpaid" scenarios because imprisoning a Forger almost never happens, and is a very special occasion when it does.

 

Sure it takes some effort to keep a Forger in, just as making sure you lock the door on a regular prisoner takes effort, but you take at least the minimum precautions necessary to hold someone. You check that you locked the manacles tight on Drunk Joe and you check that the walls are made of solid stone for Forger Jane. It's simply the done thing.

 

EDIT: To sum it up: Just as Shai can say "who would make a chain out of soap?" and have that be enough that she can never Forge that it be so, under your model we can say "who would imprison a Forger without triple-checking everything?" and know that no Forger caught and known as a Forger in the Imperial Palace could ever Forge her constraints such as to be able to escape them.

Edited July 2, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Thought]

Avast, there be Mistborn Spoilers ahead, ahar!

 

 

Like the secret of the Atium cache never getting out?

 

Exactly. If you want something safe, you have to use guards that are inhuman, like the Kandra. Of course, even then in the end the secret got out and every last bead was burned up. A shame, that. I guess there really is no one you can trust completely.

 

Imprisoning a Forger without taking the precautions I've outlined is just missing the point: to put it more strongly, it is just about pointless. TLR's Obligators kept the caches and Atium a secret because that was the bare minimum that they needed to do in order for their work to have any meaning at all. Just so, there is no point to imprisoning a Forger without these precautions, especially for any length of time. That's the kind of thing that sets "did the job well enough to still say 'we did it'" as the baseline, with the fluctuations of variable indifference all ranging far above and never below.

 

If people see that there is a need to double check a good in an emergency (like if they have a forger in their midst), then that system would be taken advantage of even when forgers aren't around. 911 is for emergencies only, yes? Misdials can account for around 4% of 911 calls, non-emergency calls can be around 40-50%. Prank calls are harder to track, though often get lumped in with non-emergency calls, so I'll leave it at that. What's the point? If something exists, people will abuse it. If there's abuse, there's the possibility of indifference. People are fools: any plan that involves them can't be fool proof. Even mundane prisoners can escape, and a forger ain't no mundane prisoner. The Rose Empire isn't even sure what a forger can actually do, and you can't defend against what you don't know.

 

To be clear, what you're proposing would be hypothetically possible. It'd just be impossible in practice (much like your suggestion of amputation: causing it should be possible in theory, but not in practice).

Edited July 2, 2013 by Thought

[Kurkistan]

Exactly. If you want something safe, you have to use guards that are inhuman, like the Kandra. Of course, even then in the end the secret got out and every last bead was burned up. A shame, that. I guess there really is no one you can trust completely.

 

*Oops, Mistborn Spoilers*

 

a) For shame, Thought.    Kandra are people too. They have failings and virtues and complete personalities. There's no need to be rude (to a fictional species. . .) and call them inhuman automatons without free will.

 

b.) I think 1,000+ years is a pretty good record, myself. The end of the world tends to result in an understandable break in the ability to follow proper protocol.

 

c) You're also ignoring the role the Steel Ministry and its Obligators played in all of this: breaking the geodes in metal rooms, transporting the Atium to and fro amongst money shipments, filling the supply caches, and only ever communicating about this by writing on metal and never speaking a word of it aloud.

 

They did this for 1,000+ years. When their foe is an evil god with infinite patience and the ability to see anything that isn't shrouded in metal and to hear everything if he only but knows where to listen. And there are potential spies for that evil god embedded at all times into the very highest levels of their organization.

 

Ruin didn't even know where the supply caches were, let alone their purpose or contents, until our heroes led him to them. That's Lord Rulering impressive on the part of TLR and his Ministry, if I do say so.

 

EDIT: Honestly, I'm not sure why I'm going to these lengths to prove consistency of operations in Mistborn. They key is, people can and will be highly effective on a long-term, institutional level, given the proper stakes, understanding of acceptable and unacceptable failure states, and incentive structure. This is true in both the real world and Brandon's writing.

 

If people see that there is a need to double check a good in an emergency (like if they have a forger in their midst), then that system would be taken advantage of even when forgers aren't around. 911 is for emergencies only, yes? Misdials can account for around 4% of 911 calls, non-emergency calls can be around 40-50%. Prank calls are harder to track, though often get lumped in with non-emergency calls, so I'll leave it at that. What's the point? If something exists, people will abuse it. If there's abuse, there's the possibility of indifference. People are fools: any plan that involves them can't be fool proof. Even mundane prisoners can escape, and a forger ain't no mundane prisoner. The Rose Empire isn't even sure what a forger can actually do, and you can't defend against what you don't know.

 

To be clear, what you're proposing would be hypothetically possible. It'd just be impossible in practice (much like your suggestion of amputation: causing it should be possible in theory, but not in practice).

 

Considering that you don't get fired/executed when you call 911 by accident, that's a rather poor example, Thought. My mother calls 911 when she doesn't want to look up the number for animal control. She probably wouldn't if that would result in ten emergency vehicles instantly descending upon her house to save her from calamity.

 

I don't know where you're getting "abusing the system" from here. Guards gain nothing and lose everything from failing to be properly rigorous in containing Forgers. What exactly are they "abusing" for what reason?

 

Also, I think you're rather underestimating humanity at this point, to put it perhaps a bit too strongly. No blacksmith will ever deliver a soap-chain to a prison. It will not happen. It does not matter that he is "a fool" or that he can "abuse" the system, it just won't happen. A jailer isn't going to ask a prisoner to hold his truncheon while he leans down to tie his shoes. It just won't happen. A jailer holding a Forger won't put on her chains until he's checked every single link: it just won't happen.

 

Obviously someone in the Rose empire knows enough about Forgery to build a 44-stone cell. Frava even has her own pet Forger. Just because conspiratorial high-level bureaucrats don't immediately know Forgeries exact limits doesn't rule out the entire government having access to that knowledge.

 

On top of that, even if all they knew was "everyone knows a cell with lots of different kinds of stone is hard for a Forger to break out of", that's the same level of "common knowledge" they'd have access to in a world where "everyone knows that you just need consistent quality checking on an institutional level for a Forger's bonds".

Edited July 2, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Thought]

*Oops, Mistborn Spoilers*

 

Oh, good point *goes back to add spoiler tags, promptly feels like River Song*

 

a) For shame, Thought.    Kandra are people too. They have failings and virtues and complete personalities. There's no need to be rude (to a fictional species. . .) and call them inhuman automatons without free will.

 

Yes, almost as if they had spikes in them that would allow a dark god to control them...

 

b.) I think 1,000+ years is a pretty good record, myself. The end of the world tends to result in an understandable break in the ability to follow proper protocol.

 

A thousand years is definitely a good record for a god who was combating a captive god with the aid of a different god and supported by non-humans, small distances, and a fanatical but small human force (that was still corrupt: it's a bit of good fortune that the corruption didn't work in Ruin's favor). And even at that, a single year of active looking on the behalf of puny humans found the stash.

 

I don't know where you're getting "abusing the system" from here. Guards gain nothing and lose everything from failing to be properly rigorous in containing Forgers. What exactly are they "abusing" for what reason?

 

Sorry, I thought the fact that we saw only one honest administrator the book made it obvious: the Grands, m'boy-o. Oh sure, the first time a Grand goes to a guard and tells them that their life depends on extra caution, the guard will give a hundred and ten percent. The second time? Less likely, but still good. The thousandth? It's not a question of how often there is a Forger to imprison, it's a question of how often power is abused. If a Grand knows that s/he has to do X in order to be sure to get quality, then they'll do X, until X has no meaning by the time they need it to keep a Forger imprisoned.

 

Take a look at the guards watching over Shai: they were ordered not to talk to her, so what did they do? They talked to her! Curse them and their knowledge that they don't really have to provide the service that the Grands want of them.

 

As for 911, I feel the comparison is actually quite apt, and would explain further, but I am uncomfortable doing so since you had brought your mother into the mix. I feel like extrapolation my position would be a prickly process: while I wouldn't be attacking her, a discussion of the underlying behaviors could be interpreted as apply to her, and thus be insulting.

 

No blacksmith will ever deliver a soap-chain to a prison. It will not happen. It does not matter that he is "a fool" or that he can "abuse" the system, it just won't happen. A jailer isn't going to ask a prisoner to hold his truncheon while he leans down to tie his shoes. It just won't happen. A jailer holding a Forger won't put on her chains until he's checked every single link: it just won't happen.

 

We're agreed on the first (unless the smith was bribed to do just that), I suspect Shai could have gotten away with the second after she had befriended her guards, and the third is a red herring: the jailer can check every link and still not find the flaw that will let a Forger escape. What do you think it's going to look like, a big ol sign that says "break here"? How are they supposed to be able to tell that one link has way too much carbon in it, or that one was crafted poorly enough that there's a bubble in it?

Edited July 2, 2013 by Thought

[Kurkistan]

Okay then. To summarize: I believe with near-absolute certainty that you are wrong on this point, both in your conclusion and your interpretation of the evidence you claim supports it. I think I've shown rather amply that you are wrong. Given the fact that you do not agree, despite my having  explained myself nearly as clearly as I believe I possibly could, I see no further purpose in contesting the issue.

 

Let the record show that Kurkistan thinks Thought's point resoundingly defeated, and that Thought disagrees. You'll have to forgive me if I file the question of "do circumstances matter for Forging?" very firmly into the "No" drawer and leave it at that.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

They did this for 1,000+ years. When their foe is an evil god with infinite patience and the ability to see anything that isn't shrouded in metal and to hear everything if he only but knows where to listen.

 

Can ruin hear in areas surrounded by metal?

[Kurkistan]

He could hear Vin in the last cache, and it seems the Ministry would be better off communicating verbally--in "metal room" of course--for their missives than writing it on theftable metal otherwise.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

He could hear Vin in the last cache, and it seems the Ministry would be better off communicating verbally--in "metal room" of course--for their missives than writing it on theftable metal otherwise.

Kandra didn't seem to have any trouble talking within their homeland, though.

 

Could be a degree of metal surrounding issue.  We know that being surrounded by a bunch of metal was enough to make it more difficult to try to take over the kandra, so...

[Kurkistan]

I don't think they ever say the magic word, actually, just saying "the Trust". I could be wrong on that, though.

Also, dare I ask for a quote on the surrounding metal making it harder?

Edited July 3, 2013 by Kurkistan

[Phantom Monstrosity]

I don't think they ever say the magic word, actually, just saying "the Trust". I could be wrong on that, though.

Also, dare I ask for a quote on the surrounding metal making it harder?

http://www.brandonsanderson.com/annotation/355/Mistborn-3-Chapter-Seventy-Nine

Even Ruin�s pressure wasn�t enough to take control immediately. The kandra had a few moments during which they could overcome him and maintain their free will. Beyond that, they were in a cavern surrounded by metal ore in the walls, making it very difficult for Ruin to see what was going on and interfering with his ability to control them.

Haddek definitely explains the whole game to Sazed, including mentioning atium by name.

"The Trust, we call it," Haddek said with a soft voice. "Given for our safekeeping by the Father."

Atium. Thousands upon thousands of beads of it. Sazed gasped. "The Lord Ruler's atium stockpile . . . It was here all along."

"Most of that atium never left the Pits of Hathsin," Haddek said. "There were obligators on staff at all times—but never Inquisitors, for the Father knew that they could be corrupted. The obligators broke the geodes in secret, inside of a metal room constructed for the purpose, then took out the atium. The noble family then transported the empty geodes to Luthadel, never knowing that they didn't have any atium in their possession at all. What atium the Lord Ruler did get, and distribute, to the nobility was brought in by the obligators. They disguised the atium as Ministry funds and hid the beads in piles of coins so that Ruin wouldn't see them as they were transported in convoys full of new acolytes to Luthadel."

[Kurkistan]

Thanks for the quote, though it doesn't settle the issue so far as being able to hear goes.

The atium mention with Sazed was kind of a special case, as it was already the end of the world and Sazed has already said the word. It is at least weak evidence, though, since you'd think they'd have cautioned him not to say the name or the like.

Edited July 3, 2013 by Kurkistan