Lerasium questions

[King Cole he/him]

Ok, me and my friend were discussing lerasium and we had some questions about it. 

1. If you are a mistborn and burn lerasium, does anything happen?

2. What if you give someone a shaving of lerasium? Could you create an army of weak mistborn that way?

Edited August 13, 2017 by King Cole

[+Extesian he/him]

2 minutes ago, King Cole said:

Ok, me and my friend were discussing lerasium and we had some questions about it. 

1. If you are a mistborn and burn lerasium, does anything happen?

2. What if you give someone a shaving of lerasium? Could you create an army of weak mistborn that way?

Lerasium actually adds to existing innate investiture, so it would make them very very powerful mistborn.

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SHARDLET

If Vin and Elend hypothetically each blindly ingested equivalently sized beads of lerasium, would Vin be a stronger Mistborn than Elend, or would they be equal?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, Vin would be stronger. It is additive, not just an overwrite.

The same thing happens with Hemalurgy; with Hemalurgy when you're spiking someone's soul, you're ripping off a piece and adding it.

Lerasium makes you a mistborn by Connecting you to Preservation, so a sliver of lerasium is unlikely to provide the threshold of Connection necessary. You can alloy it with allomantic metals to make mistings, that way it goes further. But we don't know how match lerasium is needed to make an allomantic alloy.

[Calderis he/him]

I actually disagree with @Extesianhere partially. 

I think a "sliver" may be able to make a weak Mistborn. 

The annotations of HoA tell us that the mist sickness was snapping people who normally wouldn't have become allomancers. 

If I remember correctly it gave an example of normal snapping requiring an (arbitrary) 50% allomantic potential to be snapped, and the mists were snapping people as low as 20\30%

Seeing as Lerasium, like the mists, are an actual manifestation of Preservation's investiture, I think you could make a weak Mistborn, although this is something that I admit is purely speculation. 

Another intriguing point to add here, is that we don't actually know what Lerasium does. The connection to Preservation that creates Mistborn is purely a side effect. 

http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=691#28

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CHAOS

Does atium have a "side effect", much like how lerasium has a "side effect" in creating Mistborn?

BRANDON SANDERSON

RAFO

And unfortunately that's the only WoB I could find that mentions that. 

[The One Who Connects he/him]

On 8/12/2017 at 11:59 PM, Calderis said:

And unfortunately that's the only WoB I could find that mentions that. 

Does nobody check the Coppermind anymore?

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However, turning people into Mistborn is only a side effect of burning Lerasium; if someone who knew how to use it correctly were to burn it, it would have a different, as of yet, unknown effect.^[3]

As for that [3], from the Annotations:

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Regardless, if a person can get more Preservation into them, they become better Allomancers. Hence Elend becoming a Mistborn. Like all people, he had the potential within him—it was just too small of a potential to be awakened through normal means. That little jolt of Preservation’s body, however, expanded and awakened his Allomancy.

As a tidbit, that was a side effect of what that bead of metal did. It wasn’t the main purpose of the bead, and if another Allomancer were to burn it, it would do something else.