Do lifeless keep their powers?

[Arch he/him]

Like would a mistborn turned lifeless still be able to burning metal? would a lifeless Singer/Parshendi be able to change forms? a lifeless elantrian create aons? If not surely you can spike some of these abilities in. I can't find anything confirming or denying this.

[RShara she/her]

Those abilities are part of the spiritweb, and we have a WoB that creating a Lifeless is like creating a fake soul for the person. So I don't think that the abilities carry over. Maybe some memories and such do, since memories likely are part of the physical brain (too), but I doubt any spiritweb-linked powers would. Maaaaaayyyyyybe slightly more likely if the person was made Lifeless with their own Breath, but since only Nalthians are born with Breath, that would make it even more unlikely.

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Darth Vizious

Could you make a Lifeless out of someone killed with a Shardblade?

Brandon Sanderson

Shardblades sever the soul from the body, but Awakening makes a "fake" soul for a body, so how the soul left doesn't matter.

General Twitter 2015 (Nov. 1, 2015)

 

[Arch he/him]

11 minutes ago, RShara said:

Those abilities are part of the spiritweb, and we have a WoB that creating a Lifeless is like creating a fake soul for the person. So I don't think that the abilities carry over. Maybe some memories and such do, since memories likely are part of the physical brain (too), but I doubt any spiritweb-linked powers would. Maaaaaayyyyyybe slightly more likely if the person was made Lifeless with their own Breath, but since only Nalthians are born with Breath, that would make it even more unlikely.

 

i was thinking their bodies would remember the spiritweb. Since continued use of an ability leaves a physical change in the user I thought the breath might be able to work backwards off of that... but what youre saying seems more likely. I guess spiking them should still work though, right?

[Karger he/him]

56 minutes ago, Arch said:

i was thinking their bodies would remember the spiritweb. Since continued use of an ability leaves a physical change in the user I thought the breath might be able to work backwards off of that... but what youre saying seems more likely. I guess spiking them should still work though, right?

Adding a hemalurgic spike to a lifeless would work I guess.  Stapling a bit of extra soul on there so to speek.  Not sure what you would get as a result but it looks interesting.

[RShara she/her]

3 hours ago, Arch said:

i was thinking their bodies would remember the spiritweb. Since continued use of an ability leaves a physical change in the user I thought the breath might be able to work backwards off of that... but what youre saying seems more likely. I guess spiking them should still work though, right?

I don't know if they have enough mental power to do anything with the powers they'd get. But theoretically? It should?

[+Invocation]

2 hours ago, RShara said:

I don't know if they have enough mental power to do anything with the powers they'd get. But theoretically? It should?

Spike in a little bit of intelligence; should cover it. 

Side note: I wonder if you were to spike someone's power out, make them a Lifeless, and then spike them with their own power, they'd have a better shot at being able to use it. Probably not, but would be...interesting.

[Halyo_Alex he/him]

10 hours ago, Invocation said:

Spike in a little bit of intelligence; should cover it. 

Side note: I wonder if you were to spike someone's power out, make them a Lifeless, and then spike them with their own power, they'd have a better shot at being able to use it. Probably not, but would be...interesting.

Now I'm curious about what would happen if you spiked out their Identity with duralumin, made them a Lifeless, and then spiked their own identity back into them. Would they... Regain their personality? ...maybe you'd need a copper spike in there too.

[+robardin he/him]

Maybe if you used more Breath or a different Command, on top of some hemalurgy?

After all, it took some research to come up with the maximally efficient Command to create a Lifeless with a single Breath; prior to that, it used to require fifty Breaths to make one.

We see Vasher use a somewhat complex Command to make a Lifeless squirrel, and presumably that was the one-breath version ("Awaken to my Breath, serve my needs, live at my Command and my word..."). So if a 50x improvement could be gained with the right Command, perhaps it stands to reason that a far more "restorative" Command could be created, albeit one with perhaps an exponentially higher cost of Breath. Or with the aid of a hemalurgic crutch.

Here's another thought: a Returned is a person sent back to live again in the Physical Realm just as they would pass into the Beyond, with a fragment of Endowment that is a single Divine Breath equivalent to the Fifth Heightening.

So perhaps, a very powerful Awakener with a lot of Breath could "Return" someone who'd just died, like performing the Surge of Regrowth would do (without the effect of giving a Divine Breath), by forming the right Command, one like "live again"... At a cost of, say, enough Breath to reach the Fifth Heightening (2,000 Breaths)? And maybe the most efficient Command would be one that doesn't bind the person to "live at my Command" but simply "live as you were"?

[Karger he/him]

Wow easy way to kill lifeless.  Just spike the breath out of them and they die.

[Elegy he/him]

That is certainly a way to do it, but still harder than killing a living person. You'd have to use a hemalurgic spike and hit the right spot with it (like the sides or the aorta). With a regular person ... well, all people do in medivial wars is spiking people and they die. So yeah.

[Calderis he/him]

Unfortunately, at least unless Brandon has changed his mind, breath aren't able to be stolen by spikes. 

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Questioner

With spikes, would you be able to actually transfer Breaths, when they get to the other planets?

Brandon Sanderson

So spikes rip off pieces of the soul and so Breaths are not going to be part of the soul. You could maybe get a divine Breath but I haven't really decided on regular Breaths, they're kind of stuck there in the Physical Realm which is not a thing that spikes are dealing with. Divine Breath, potentially, because that's something that's actually melding onto your soul. But, you know, when you're using the Breaths they reach through to the Spiritual Realm so, maybe if you got it while the Breaths were kinetic, right, while you're using them, then you might be able to rip them off. I'm not a hundred percent certain on that one.

Bystander

There's still things to decide upon.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah there's still things, like I have to kind of see. My instinct says no right now. But, you know, how they interact is not something that I have-- Yeah.

Shadows of Self London UK signing (Oct. 19, 2015)