Where Do Metals Go?

[Wonko the Sane he/him]

This question has been bugging me for a long time, and no one else seems to be bothered by it. When an allomancer burns a sample of metal, it is 'used up', and cannot be further used for the Metallic Arts. All this is well and good, but what exactly happens to it? where do the actual, physical molecules go? Are they converted into an unnamed, allomantically inert substance? Or are they actually annihilated?

 

Let me posit a strange example: Kim the mistborn swallows 20 lbs of copper. I realize that this would be difficult, but Kim is very determined (and more than a little insane). She then stands on one end of a scale, the other end being weighted to balance her perfectly. Then, she starts burning her copper supply. This is going to take a while, so let's leave her there for a while.

 

While we wait, I want to bring up a few points. I would have suggested Kim use aluminum or duralumin, except that there is no guarantee that the process is the same. Nevertheless, I would like to know where the metal goes in these cases, as well.

 

I would also like to bring up the special case of atium. WoB confirms that when atium is burned, the metal returns to Ruin's Shardpool above the Pits of Hathsin. This probably implies that the metal does, in fact, vanish from the allomancer's stomach. However, we must remember that atium is an extraordinarily atypical substance, and quite possibly functions in a completely different manner from other metals.

 

At this point, we come back to Kim, who has now been continuously burning copper for several days. Has the scale been unbalanced? That is, has the mass of the copper been subtracted from her weight? If not, what substance has taken the place of the twenty pounds of copper in her stomach? If so, where has it gone?

 

An additional thought: what about the volume of the huge lump of copper? would Kim's stomach visibly shrink throughout this process?

 

Note: I realize that this is a work of fantasy, and that physics will have to be bent and broken in places. However, "a wizard did it" is hardly Brandon's style, and, if possible, I would prefer a more satisfying explanation.

[Moogle]

We have a WoB confirming that burned metals will return to Scadrial, so there's something of a power conservation law going on, though obviously it's broken in cases like Iron Feruchemy. Because of this, I anticipate her stomach deflating and her weight slowly returning to normal as she goes through the copper.

 

Also: what a nice reference to BG2 in your username.

[Wonko the Sane he/him]

BG2? I'm not sure I follow. Wonko the Sane is a minor character in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Trilogy* by Douglas Adams. His primary character trait is a belief that the rest of the world is completely and totally insane. The following is a quote, which I have abridged for relevance:

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this was the first thing that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered, it would help to know what it was like.

It was like this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had had to park on the carpet.

All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which was decorated in a tasteful interior-deisgned pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semicircular tops which stand in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures which were clearly designed to soothe.

The sign above the front door read "Come Outside," and so, nervously, they had.

Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork, nicely done pointing, gutters in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

"Hello," said Wonko the Sane.

Good, they thought to themselves, "hello" is something we can cope with.

"Hello," they said, and all, surprisingly, was smiles.

. . . "Your wife," said Arthur, looking around, "mentioned some toothpicks." He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind a door and mention them again.

Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.

"Ah yes," he said, "that's to do with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.

"Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing, and the gutters. "Go through that door" -- he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered -- "and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there myself. If I ever am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and I shy away."

"That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.

"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."

The sign read:

"Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion."

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.

The character is also known for his claims of being frequently visited by angels with golden beards and green wings, who wear Dr. Scholl's sandals and ride on little scooters.

*This is not a mistake. There are five books in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Wonko the Sane

[Moogle]

Gah. Should have guessed, given I've read the Hitchhiker books. I thought it was a more subtle reference to Lonk the Sane of Baldur's Gate 2.

[Aether he/him]

Gah. Should have guessed, given I've read the Hitchhiker books. I thought it was a more subtle reference to Lonk the Sane of Baldur's Gate 2.

... which is itself a reference to the Hitchhiker... Bioware does that. And it is awesome! =P

 

[Wonko the Sane he/him]

Thank you, by the way, for answering my question. I honestly didn't expect that to happen; I was just hoping to get everyone's take on it.

 

It does raise a few other questions, though. For example, how fast is this recycling process? If it's instantaneous, it could be used for FTL information transfer. Additionally - although I'm dead certain that this has been asked before, even without checking - it begs the question, at what point does swallowed matter get assimilated into a person's weight for Feruchemical iron purposes?

 

Oh! And how about spikes? Do they add to your weight? If they do, I have an incredible idea:

 

Step 1: Be a Skimmer.

Step 2: Find a helpless victim. Any fool will do, but I find it's more satisfying to use a mortal enemy.

Step 3: Buy metal. Buy a LOT of metal.

Step 4: Construct a length of metal several miles long.

Step 5: Use your megaspike to hemalurgically transfer some trait or other from helpless victim to you.

Step 6: Start storing about 50% of your SEVERAL HUNDRED TONS of weight in an enormous chunk of iron.

Step 7: Wait a while. If you used a mortal enemy as your helpless victim, you can amuse yourself by staring at his blood-soaked corpse and laughing maniacally. 

Step 8: Remove megaspike.

Step 9: Find something you don't like. Stand on it. Crush it.

Step 10: Repeat as needed.

 

In all seriousness, the above plan might actually be possible.

[Araris Valerian he/him]

While I personally believe that a spike would add to your weight, and thus would be able to be stored in a metalmind, we have some WoB that you don't store a percentage of an attribute, but a flat amount that the feruchemist can adjust at will. Otherwise, ceratin powers such as age could be abused since there really isn't an upper limit. However, if you only weighed 5 pounds then your max weight that you could store at any point, without any restrictions, would be 5 pounds. If you gained a 500 pound spike I believe that you would be able to store up to 100 pounds or something nearby. Mostly this is just my opinion though.

[king of nowhere]

I think those questions aren't answered. It don't mean that they have no answer, just that brandon never had to come up with them. After all, we could spend years coming up with further questions.  while brandon makes detailed and self consistent magic systems, and that includes having answers to questions like "where the metal go", there's just no way to plan for all the details and subtlew interactions.

You can ask him at a convention, and he's likely to answer.

[Wonko the Sane he/him]

@king of nowhere: Actually, if you look back, I think that Moogle answered that question fairly satisfactorily. Additionally, I wasn't actually asking for straight answers - I was surprised to get one. I was just asking for everyone else's opinions.

[name_here]

Because of how the caches are sited (that is, they were built in metal-rich towns a long time ago and the towns are well-known to be metal-rich and are still metal-rich instead of mined out) I generally assume burned metals slowly reaccumulate near where they were mined.

[Wonko the Sane he/him]

While I personally believe that a spike would add to your weight, and thus would be able to be stored in a metalmind, we have some WoB that you don't store a percentage of an attribute, but a flat amount that the feruchemist can adjust at will. Otherwise, ceratin powers such as age could be abused since there really isn't an upper limit. However, if you only weighed 5 pounds then your max weight that you could store at any point, without any restrictions, would be 5 pounds. If you gained a 500 pound spike I believe that you would be able to store up to 100 pounds or something nearby. Mostly this is just my opinion though.

 

Actually, this is a perfect defense for the opposite point. The reason why you can't store more than you have is that you can't go below 0% of your standard value - that is, you can't have a negative weight. Additionally, we have this WoB discussing storing in terms of percentages.

 

I'm also curious as to why you think a feruchemist would be able to store a fraction of the weight of the spike, but not all of it. In your own example, someone weighing 5lb can store 5lb, but someone weighing 505lb (5lb plus a 500lb spike) could only store 105lb?