[OB] Awakening on Roshar (with Stormlight)

[+Trellium]

@RShara and @Spoolofwhool brought up the following WOB on discord earlier, which got me thinking:

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ZENBOSSANOVA

Can Vasher use Stormlight to Awaken things?

BRANDON SANDERSON

No, all it does is keep him alive. But he has tried and has not figured out how to awaken things.

Vasher can't awaken with Stormlight, only surivive on it for now. But Brandon implies it can be figured out.

We know that Breath and Stormlight are both investiture, and should both be able to power the same abilities if properly hacked. The difference seems to be that Breath is sticky, and will stay put in any object indefinitely. In fact it's so sticky that it can't be recovered from lifeless at all.  Stormlight on the other hand leaks out of people and can only be absorbed by individuals with a nahel bond or honorblade. It can, however, be infused in gemstones, which is the main way to store investiture in Roshar.

 

Fabrials are made of gemstones with captured spren inside. Spren are investiture. "Perfect Gemstones" hold investiture indefinitely, and have been shown capable of trapping even large spren made of significant amounts of investiture (unmade). 

If Vasher took infused gemstones, and placed them in a fabrial construct made of organic material with a lowered threshold for awakening, for example, by studding his extra long tasseled sleeves on his person shaped cloak with infused rubies in the right locations, he should be able to form the right Intent and vocalize the right command to awaken and animate the garment. Anything but a perfect gemstone would of course slowly leak out the power, but the stones could be replaced or reinfused as needed.

A perfect gemstone filled to the brim with stormlight and placed in the pommel of a sword may be able to be awakened into a Type IV sentient object with a single powerful command. Using anything less than a perfect stone would be cruel though, as the entity would need to feed constantly like a Returned to stay infused enough to retain sapience.

It may even be possible to place an infused gemstone into a corpse and create a Lifeless who will function until it runs out of stormlight. This combined with soulcasting and the knowledge that went into creating Kalad's Phantoms could be used to create a super soldier. Take the body of a warrior who is killed in battle. Embed a perfect gemstone fully infused with stormlight in the chest of the corpse. Soulcast many thin layers of graphine over the body to create layers of essentially kevlar, soulcast a layer of Kalad's Phantom style armor of thick Stone or Metal on top of that. Awaken the corpse with the most efficient lifeless commands. Use a second infused perfect gemstone in the pommel of a sword as described above to create a sentient Type IV entity with the command "Vex Odium". Give the sword to the super soulcast lifeless soldier. Command the lifeless to obey the sword.

Sit back and sip on the color wine of your choosing while Odium gets vexed

[Leyrann]

Where are you getting the perfect gemstones from? I'd argue that even soulcasting has it's limits, and I can at least say for sure that modern science can't make perfect crystals.

[+Trellium]

Well you would only need two perfect gemstones for what I proposed. And we've already seen the King's Drop in Thaylen City. Plus per the Gemstone Archive in Urithiru "As the duly appointed keepers of the perfect gems, we of the Elsecallers have taken the burden of protecting the ruby nicknamed Honor's Drop. Let it be recorded."   So they are out there, and will probably be hunted down over the next two books to capture Unmade.

As for my other suggestion, just like Shardplate is powered by Stormlight from replaceable / rechargeable gemstones, a fabrial construction / awakened garment like Vasher's Cloak wouldn't require perfect stones.

My main takeaway is just that the thing that Vasher is missing is a way to make the Stormlight stick in place when he tries to awaken something. Typically, on Roshar, the way to do that is stick a gemstone in or on something.

[Spoolofwhool]

There are likely a whole other set of issues when attempting to awaken with stormlight instead of breath, once the issue of maintaining stormlight is solved. The main problem is linked to how awakening works on a base level, which I think is as follows.

In awakening, the awakener formulates a command with appropriate visualization, which "imprints" into the breath. This breath then transfers to the target and shapes into an artificial soul which builds on top of the object's pre-existing soul. This artificial soul is what augments the object to have the capability to move, have awareness, etc. and is related to the properties of breath to be sticky, as the stickiness of breath is due to its nature of interfacing with the soul of the holder, and changing it in different ways.

Stormlight would not possess the properties of breath which allow it to imprint the command made by the awakener, nor would it naturally possess the ability to interface with an object's soul that awakening requires. Therefore, even with a perfect gemstone containing ample amount of stormlight, awakening would not be easily possible, without processes which would essentially involve changing the properties of stormlight. If it were as easy as "using a perfect gemstone", it still would've been relatively simple to test that in the past, by awakening using a large amount of stormlight into a non-perfect gem, which still would've resulted in a limited awakening until the stormlight dissipated. 

 

20 minutes ago, Leyrann said:

I'd argue that even soulcasting has it's limits

You can't soulcast gems. 

[+Trellium]

Interesting point about getting the investiture to interface with the object's soul. That's the part where I think he would need the knowledge of a Rosharan Artifabrian. We don't know enough about how Fabrials are constructed, but they do channel the effects of the spren / investiture they contain into physical objects they are built onto. For example, Veden Half Shards. Another interesting analogue is the Soulcaster Fabrial. These utilize infused gemstones and fabrial construction to allow any user to interface with the souls of objects around them. So in a way, Rosharan scholars are already working on this whole other set of issues. Vasher and Navani should collaborate. It can't go as poorly as his last collaboration. 

[Spoolofwhool]

Possibly. However, what would be required is a fundamental change in the properties of stormlight, properties which fabrials are naturally utilizing. While knowledge of fabrials could help in understanding the properties of stormlight, they wouldn't inform much about how to get it to act how it needs to be for awakening. 

[Calderis]

If the stormlight is trapped in the gem, it wouldn't be acting to animate the object. 

For example, in an awakened statue with joints, the breath literally acts as the muscles and tendons, moving the object. 

The Stormlight needs to be in the object, imprinted with a command as @Spoolofwhool said.

[+Trellium]

It seems like Fabrials have the ability to allow the investiture required for the functionality to flow out as it is needed. For example, a Veden Half-Shard can block a Shardblade, presumably because the material it is made out of is strengthened or transformed in some way by the investiture contained in the gemstones. This investiture is obviously drawn out of the stones and into the Shield upon impact, which drains, stresses, and breaks the stones. Similarly, a Soulcaster Fabrial uses just the required amount of investiture when called upon by the Intent of its user to achieve the required Transformation. As this power is called forth, large gemstones also drain, stress, and break. So I guess my design wouldn't work unless the item to be awakened somehow required few enough breaths that the gemstones could hold more than enough Stormlight to awaken it initially and provide a continuing draw for as long as the object was awakened to compensate for the lack of stickyness of Stormlight. Given the rate of leakage from organic beings, and the high cost of most awakening, this seems very unlikely. 

The Stormlight won't be trapped in the gem. The gem will act within the context of the Fabrial design as a battery releasing the Stormlight as needed to keep the awakened object "charged" with sufficient investiture.This won't work because investiture requirements are impracticably large both in raw storage and rate of consumption.

But perhaps these restrictions can be worked around in the case of a large stationary Type IV Sentient Awakened object. It would simply need an enormous block of gemstones exposed to each passing Highstorm. These gemstones would act as a conduit to provide the initial chunk of power needed to awaken the object in the first place during a storm, and would then slowly provide a source of additional power to keep the object replenished from Stormlight leakage between storms. 

[MountainKing]

I think you could make a fabrial appear like it was awakened and maybe with the right spren, you could imprint stormlight with the command, and the fabrial would process it for you. But I think the biggest problem is that the investiture we have seen isn't raw investitiure, It's investiture that has been processed or transformed to create certain effects.

[Spoolofwhool]

Keep in mind that fabrials don't work by manipulating stormlight to produce effects. They work by feeding the trapped spren stormlight, which then cause the effect. This means that there's a black box (the spren) in every fabrial doing the actual heavy lifting. It's not the design of the fabrial which is causing stormlight to spread out and doing things in the object, it's the spren which is affecting the fabrials and surroundings and causing the effects we see. Also, we can't really compare soulcaster fabrials since we don't know how those actually work. 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Spoolofwhool

[MountainKing]

3 hours ago, Spoolofwhool said:

Keep in mind that fabrials don't work by manipulating stormlight to produce effects. They work by feeding the trapped spren stormlight, which then cause the effect. This means that there's a black box (the spren) in every fabrial doing the actual heavy lifting. It's not the design of the fabrial which is causing stormlight to spread out and doing things in the object, it's the spren which is affecting the fabrials and surroundings and causing the effects we see. Also, we can't really compare soulcaster fabrials since we don't know how those actually work. 

Actually the fabrial affects the effect of the fabrial. Depending on different types of cuts, different gems, and what someone did to the gem before it alters the affect of the fabrial. So spren and the gem help shape the affect.

[Spoolofwhool]

Just now, MountainKing said:

Actually the fabrial affects the effect of the fabrial. Depending on different types of cuts, different gems, and what someone did to the gem before it alters the affect of the fabrial. So spren and the gem help shape the affect.

True, but my point of the shape of the fabrial not causing stormlight from the gem to spread through the device still stands though.

[MountainKing]

You could probably use a spren with a complex idea attached to it or a sentient spren to cause the whole item to be affected by the fabrial.

[Gasper]

As far as perfect gems go, it is possible to create gem that are single crystals. It is difficult in some cases, but I think using certain methods found here on earth and easily duplicated on Roshar would be the way to go. Maybe that is one of the things the scadrians introduce, as they are at about the right stage of development to start experimenting with that technology. The perfect gems would give the stickyness needed to operate an awakened object, as mentioned above, sewing them into things or using them as a gem heart is probably the way to go. 

[Wandering Investor]

As others have pointed out, there are fundamental differences between stormlight and breaths. While both are investiture, its similar to how iron and oxygen are both matter, they're very different. Stormlight acts like a storm, its full of movement and wild energy. Breaths on the other hand are basically miniature souls. 

In awakening, there are several things that happen. A command, visualization, and color are fed to an intelligence, which then carries out the command if understood using internal power. In this case the breaths provide both the base intelligence that carries out the commands and the power source. While stormlight can function as a power source, it cannot provide the mechanism to carry out the commands. 

Now, could you give a command to a spren?

[MountainKing]

1 hour ago, Wandering Investor said:

As others have pointed out, there are fundamental differences between stormlight and breaths. While both are investiture, its similar to how iron and oxygen are both matter, they're very different. Stormlight acts like a storm, its full of movement and wild energy. Breaths on the other hand are basically miniature souls. 

In awakening, there are several things that happen. A command, visualization, and color are fed to an intelligence, which then carries out the command if understood using internal power. In this case the breaths provide both the base intelligence that carries out the commands and the power source. While stormlight can function as a power source, it cannot provide the mechanism to carry out the commands. 

Now, could you give a command to a spren?

A sentient one

[Overlord Jebus]

Moved to Oathbringer Spoiler board due to Oathbringer spoilers

[Wandering Investor]

12 hours ago, MountainKing said:

A sentient one

To expand, the question is whether a command can be forced onto a spren. You'd have to find a spren that can take the command, willingly or not, and the spren would have to be able to channel the stormlight into the correct action. Can you bind a sentient spren to your will? Some theories suggest that the old fabrials, the soulcaster and healing device, may use higher spren.

[teknopathetic]

I wonder if it is possible for someone with enough knowledge and power to Soulcast stormlight into breath itself? While i know investiture doesn't like being manipulated by other investiture, and that stormlight isn't matter (its energy probably), it still should be possible somehow. 

Edited June 11, 2018 by teknopathetic

[RShara]

16 hours ago, teknopathetic said:

I wonder if it is possible for someone with enough knowledge and power to Soulcast stormlight into breath itself? While i know investiture doesn't like being manipulated by other investiture, and that stormlight isn't matter (its energy probably), it still should be possible somehow. 

It would be really hard. Investiture resists investiture, and given that both stormlight and Breath are pure investiture, it'd be almost as hard as trying to soulcast atium into lerasium, and we know that's not possible.

 

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Phantine

Could you soulcast atium from god-metal into god-wood?

Brandon Sanderson

Soulcasting atium would take a heap-ton of Investiture. You'd need a huge source to power that. 

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ninch

Could a person Soulcast more atium and lerasium if they had a bead?

Brandon Sanderson

No. Investiture messes things like that up.

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