Second Heightening and Pure Tones

[Cocoa he/him]

I sadly don't have a copy of RoW in front of me to compare since I just borrowed it from the library, but I'm currently reading back through Warbreaker and thought of a possible interaction between the perfect pitch granted by the second heightening and the way different Shards' investiture works as revealed in RoW.

Provided that they knew the Shard's rhythm and pure tone in the first place, I think that being of the second heightening or higher would make someone better at manipulating investiture with sound in the way we saw in RoW, especially Endowment's investiture since being of second heightening would mean you have a lot of her investiture in your system already. I doubt you could steal Breaths from a person with it and might not even be able to move it from one object to another since they seem to be a much 'stickier' type of investiture than stormlight is, but being able to perfectly match different pure tones using perfect pitch would make creating hybrid and anti-investitures significantly easier, once you know how.

With that in mind, I think that by the times of Mistborn Ears 3 and 4 (and whatever else is going on in the Cosmere during that time), we're going to see a Nalthis that's become the Cosmere center of meta-Investiture production. I doubt Roshar can keep the secrets of meta-Investiture from getting out indefinitely, and we know the Ghostbloods are working on a way to transport loose investiture between worlds. Anti-investiture would probably still be easier to produce than hybrid-investiture, since it just requires the intent to make it (and a vacuum) rather than an 'emulsifier.'

I don't want to go on a whole tangent about it but now I'm also wondering what the second heightening would do for a Seeker.

and whether the process for splitting Ettmetal back into Atium and Lerasium has anything to do with tonal manipulation, like a reverse of how Warlight is created

[Honorless he/him]

We do see Raysium channeling anti-Voidlight just fine so I wonder how the tones interact with godmetals.

I really like that idea, using the Tones to distill the Mists into Lerasium & Atium, I don't think Harmonium itself can be converted though. Brandon, while talking about the godmetals of Shardblades said that the god-alloys were a thing in itself, not just H+C but something new created from both of them.

Second Heightening Seeker would be dope! Oh, crossovers can't come fast enough for me! 

[Frustration]

1 minute ago, Honorless said:

I don't think Harmonium itself can be converted though. Brandon, while talking about the godmetals of Shardblades said that the god-alloys were a thing in itself, not just H+C but something new created from both of them.

Just like the Lights are.

[Cocoa he/him]

10 hours ago, Honorless said:

We do see Raysium channeling anti-Voidlight just fine so I wonder how the tones interact with godmetals.

Actually, that's a really good point I hadn't considered. We saw with Lerasium and the Well of Ascension and the Mists that they were all the same power of Preservation in different forms, so if it were always as simple as Investiture A + anti-Investiture A = Earth-Shattering Kaboom, then Raysium should have reacted to the anti-Voidlight. That it didn't must mean we're missing something, either in terms of how Investiture and anti-Investiture play off each other or in terms of how Investiture behaves when it's condensed down into a god metal.

[Frustration]

1 hour ago, Cocoa said:

Actually, that's a really good point I hadn't considered. We saw with Lerasium and the Well of Ascension and the Mists that they were all the same power of Preservation in different forms, so if it were always as simple as Investiture A + anti-Investiture A = Earth-Shattering Kaboom, then Raysium should have reacted to the anti-Voidlight. That it didn't must mean we're missing something, either in terms of how Investiture and anti-Investiture play off each other or in terms of how Investiture behaves when it's condensed down into a god metal.

Not neccesarily, when shard metals are formed they have so much investiture stored in one spot that the rules start to break down, that's why you can push/pull and store in Atium

[Serack he/him]

I wrote up some stuff about the RL principles of tones and such in an old post and it might influence how you think about these things.