Kurkistan

@Phantom And I'm totally fine with flexibility and all. It's all granular, with incremental improvements from each additional Breath. That still won't save our resident antique from becoming dust, though, unless he has at least tens of thousands of Breath tucked away @Satsuoni Epilogue, Page 636 of my paperback Sazed: "His own aging would have killed him soon anyway, Mistress [Vin]. What you did [stabby stabby] was right. This way, I can record that the Lord Ruler was struck down by one of the skaa he had oppressed." Also, as an aside, I note that Sazed said "he aged incredibly quickly because his body was trying to stretch back to where it should have been" on the page before that. Now, this is just Sazed speculating, but it's also Brandon telling us what just happened, so I'll go with it as the body actively trying to get back to its natural base age, not just a side effect (yes, I'm rather prejudiced to trust the text on this point).

Copper: yes. It's an odd-un, I'll give you that. Tin: no. The different senses are stored in different tinminds. Bendalloy: So far as I know, Subsumer's simply store calories and "fluid", not specific foods or nutrients, making everything generic. -AoLAAA: "Subsumer Ferrings can store nutrition and calories in a bendalloy metalmind; they can eat large amounts of food during active storage without feeling full or gaining weight, and then can go without the need to eat while tapping the metalmind. A separate bendalloy metalmindcan be used to similarly regulate fluids intake." Nicrosil: So far as I know (again), Nicrosil "genericizes" the Investiture it stores. Both nicrosil and bendalloy haven't been seen in the books yet, and we only have the MAG to go on for them. I think the way the MAG presents them (especially bendalloy, nicrosil could just be another odd duck) is quite reasonable though. Even if both are in Copper's weird little camp, that's still a vast majority of "on/off" metals. For Feruchemical gold in particular, we also have from just how it's discussed (with no less than three sometimes-viewpoint characters to look at) that it's all about speed of tapping. Even if not, I'm not sure how Feruchemical gold would allow "control" in any way similar to Feruchemical copper. Feruchemical copper allows you to store things of different types (differentiated memories) and draw them back discretely. Feruchemical gold allows you to store Health and draw it back. It doesn't allow you to store "scar-forming Health" and then draw it back all on its lonesome. If Feruchemical bendalloy allows different kinds of food to be stored as separate kinds, or Feruchemical nicrosil allows diversity, both would be acting just like Feruchemical copper: you put a variety of fundamentally different things in and get those different things out. No Feruchemical power allows you to extract diversity from uniformity, as you ask that we do with Feruchemical gold: the few unique ones simply allow you to keep the diverse diverse. --- For skin-loss, you yourself (yes, I double-checked this time ) give us the answer; look only to how your special, regenerating but not scarring mice heal: "you don't get scarring when they heal, but the healing process also takes a lot longer." So imagine that Wayne is one of those mice and what will his back look like after X days of normal (for freaky mutant mice) healing?

Oh, wow, I managed to misread you there. Sorry, I guess I was going too fast, what with jumping around half a dozen threads at the same time. Looking at your post again, I don't think that's quite how we see Feruchemical gold working. I think it's always like with the regenerating mice: no scar tissue ever. I had entertained the idea that a particularly slow Healing could give you scar tissue instead, but I do think it's mostly a case of one or the other. Wax isn't stripping off scar tissue, he's stripping off dead skin. The skin underneath is perfectly healthy, if a bit new. Not scarred at all. I think it really has to be a wholly regenerative process because fingers don't grow back. They just don't. It doesn't matter what's fastest, or most efficient, you're not gong to get those digits back. But Wayne can. Now if you want to suggest that Wayne could scar-up his stumps one day and then heal the fingers back another: maybe. I can see such a system working. But Feruchemists can only control rate of storage or tapping, nothing more. So the only thing to differentiate between "form scar tissue" and "form new fingers" is the amount you tap. Miles at super-tapping regrows things and Inquisitors are always low on Health, so it seems that especially low levels of tapping are what result in scar tissue. Thus, slow healing and Marsh would be better off fixing his face completely. How else would you have the Feruchemist "choose" scars, seeing as we neither see a two-tier "scar tissue, then unnatural regrowth" process nor have much reason to posit one, in the face this Marsh evidence?

But he was well on the way to dying of acute age, if we're to believe Sazed. I'm not sure how something so pitiful as a spear in the chest is supposed to faze someone capable of indefinitely fighting off a millennium of age, and Miles was going to die eventually. So far as Health vs Age goes, it's just the way the cookie crumbles, Realmatically. Heck, it's half the motivation for my mildly insane "Forms" obsession.

The one that's faster and doesn't have any chance of messing with my fighters balance or senses: Spend whatever amount of my (near infinite, because of multiple Pewter spikes and ability to cheaply directly fuel Hemalurgy-enabled magic) Feruchemical gold I have to to get Marsh up and running as soon as Inquisitorially possible and headed for the Pits. You yourself said that "scar healing" takes more time, so it's wasteful in the one commodity that was sorely lacking at that point in the story.

Now now Phantom, there's organ failure and there's organ failure. A mellinarian is going to have the latter. Recall that we've just gone through an entire process to show that the Fifth Heightening is simply a threshold, quantitatively different from having fewer Breath, not qualitatively. The same gradual buildup that eventually halts your aging is probably seen in the robustness of your organs, and I imagine that you'll need quite a bit more juice to keep them going after you're dealing with a century or two of (pre-Heightening) age.

Actually, if anything is like the realm of "real existences," it's the Spiritual (what with it's concern with ideal states and whatnot), not the Cognitive. That doesn't rule out inter-world travel through Shadesmar having temporal consequences, though.

I'd really like to buy your alternate explanation, but there you go giving me reason to doubt you with that quote. Super-Marsh didn't have the juice to spare to heal his broken face before battling for the fate of the planet? I feel like you might want your Champion in peak condition at that point, no half-measures. Unless he couldn't be healed without scars. . . It may be the case that a Wayne without enough juice would just grow back only a small length of his fingers that would then eventually scar over naturally, though slightly longer than they would have been without Feruchemical gold intervention.

Still, we know it's spaceships and whatnot in the third Mistborn trilogy. You really don't need that stuff if you're using Shadesmar. Also, it's highly suggestive of movement through space. We have it verbatim from Brandon that Shadesmar is (usually) identical to the Cognitive Realm, and connecting all the Shardworlds. The quote I provided earlier identifies the Shadesmar as a "special case" which does not exist in interplanetary space. Shadesmar, is the thing that connects all the Shardworlds, though, so no Shadesmar, no travel between worlds.

Perhaps. But still, it seems that we're a tad constrained by how Feruchemical gold works. It's very set on getting you back to "the form of yourself," so I'm unsure as to whether Wayne ever really has a choice but to, in another example, regrow his fingers rather than just forming scar tissue over the stumps. If you're right, though, it would solve my little crisis neatly.

A Resealer's stamp and Feruchemical gold both have the same effect: they heal you back to "the form of yourself." But they work through different mechanisms. A man raising his arm is different from his arm being raised by some (unstoppable, for the sake of examples) external force, but both have the same "effect." This difference matters (beyond the merely philosophical) when you talk about how to stop that man from raising his arm. If you say "well, you raise your arms through electrical impulses, so we just need to counteract those electrical impulses" then you will only be able to actually stop the arm from raising in one of these two cases. P.S. I wrote "Form of yourself" automatically on the first draft. I may need to take a break. . . It's the difference between a man flying through the air because he jumped versus being thrown: You can stop the one by interfering with his impulse to jump (counteracting TLR's inclination to age), but you need a different technique to catch the thrown man (counteracting TLR's inclination to snap back to his real age). I understand what you're saying perfectly, given your claims about what happens when you remove Atiumminds. I do not, however, agree with your views on that score. @Phantom Okay, I'll give you that. Still, undead.

No problem, I'm just glad I got there before Phantom, what with his unnatural quote-finding abilities. I think it's confirmed in-book that the Sunmaker was their during the Hierocracy, and caused the "failure" part of the "Failure of Vorinism" after the church (supposedly) tried for a takeover. I haven't re-read in a bit, though, so the "Failure" might have been a period of time rather than an event, meaning that the Hierocracy would end with the Sunmaker, but begin at some point fairly far before his time.

I was rereading Mistborn: FE recently, and noticed something odd about Inquistors' healing: It leaves scars. Their healing does seem to be due to gold Feruchemy: in the annotations, Brandon says "The Inquisitors can actually heal far more quickly than I've had them do in this book," and later says "Two attributes that can be stored up by Feruchemists, by the way, are healing and the ability to move very quickly," rather heavily implying that gold Feruchemy is how the Inquisitors heal. But, in the scene after Vin is captured (pg 600 of my paperback, chapter 36), she notices that one of the Inquisitors' face is pocked with arrow-head scars, mere hours after her "iron ring behind a stone arrowhead" trick punched a few holes into him. That's right, scars. Scars. After a few hours and using gold Feruchemy. This is bad, and does not at all align with how Gold works in any other context we've seen. I see a few options to explain this. 1) Continuity error. Brandon changed his mind about how gold Feruchemy works. I doubt this, though, because TLR is perfectly fine with being speared and flayed and (mostly) beheaded and burned alive and. . . with nary a scar to be seen. That suggests that "normal" gold Feruchemy works in the scar-less way we know and love, even in this first book. Brandon also wrote all three Mistborn books together, so it seems like he'd catch this. -Still, it's a possibility. It's a rather small reference, and easy to miss. On the flip side, it is rather important to Vin/the reader's realization that the Inquisitors can Heal themselves quickly like TLR can, and one of several routes by which to follow the rabbit trail down to Feruchemy, so Brandon might have left such a relatively minor magic system error in on purpose. 2) The Inquisitor wasn't using gold Feruchemy, but instead some other method. Perhaps an as-yet-unknown Hemalurgic spike, or super-flared double pewter. I seriously doubt this, though. We know from the Brandonothology that "The [inquisitors] alive now pretty much all have healing spikes", so why would our Inquisitor use an inferior methid, especially since he was hurt enough by the arrows to literally had holes blown through him. Add this to Brandon's hints in the annotations about Inquisitors using gold Feruchemy, and it's almost certain that our scarred Inquisitor healed himself with it. 3) Any gold Feruchemy not applied near-instantaneously leaves some scars behind. I doubt this as well: it seems from TES that Cognitive aspects (on which Healing is based) are rather robust and long-lasting, so I can't imagine that a few hours would make "holes punched through my face" the new normal, even putting aside how the Inquisitor would stay alive long enough to have his Cognitive aspect change without using gold Feruchemy. 4) The scarred Inquisitor applied gold Feruchemy in the same way that we usually see--as we see with Wayne, Miles, Sazed, and TLR--and yet was still left with scars. 4.1) This scarring was a result of the Inquisitor being an Inquisitor. Inquisitors are unnatural creatures, not truly human anymore. They seem to grow in height, they become fatigued easily (beyond just resting a lot to store up Feruchemy), and they're unnaturally creepy ( ). Maybe gold Feruchemy just works differently on them. 4.1.1) The otherwise normal gold Feruchemy that Inquisitors use is twisted by their otherwise "Ruinous" dispositions. Whereas a normal person with a single spike for gold Feruchemy might well be able to Heal himself normally, Inquisitors who have been twisted to the point where they need "linchpin" spikes just to stay alive are beyond the pale. This is slightly different from 4.1 in that perhaps a Kandra or othersuch "unnatural" creature could still get "pure" gold Feruchemy. 4.2) Hemalurgic Feruchemical gold is scar-inducing. I'm not sure about this one. It's in line with the above and with how "Ruin likes to Ruin things", with Ruin allowing Healing, but in an "end negative" way that still leaves the user worse off than they were before they were wounded. Perhaps. But it's a rather extreme effect, especially since we've already identified "it's harder to store Health" as our consequence for Hemalurgic decay. I suppose Ruin could take a special interest in deforming the effects of perhaps the most "Preservationy" of the Feruchemical effects. Myself, I'm leaning towards some variant of 4, if you couldn't guess from the detail I went into for that option. 4.1 or 4.1.1, ideally. Your thoughts?

Do objects "distend" the surface of time bubbles as they straddle the border, but are still either completely in or completely out? So a Pulser standing next to a train wouldn't be able to bubble anyone "through" the train's interference, the surface of the bubble trying to wrap around it instead.

Is it just me, or is the "Twitter" section of the sidebar empty, and has been for the last day or two? It's a rather unfortunate time, as Brandon is apparently on the home stretch.

SO MUCH REPLYING! So selfish Kadrok! We can make everyone (besides a few thousand babies each) immortal! Otherwise the general populous gets jealous and tries to do what age could not. The key to making society accept vampires is to make society vampires. Way ahead of you, Kadrok. That was totally just a test on my part . You're on The List now. But yes, were I evil, that would be a good way to double up on output. But instant snapping to a state of ideals is in itself a Returned attribute; see their weirdly good healing, as well as general adherence to ideals of physical perfection. Also, fun fact: I'm fairly sure that they are zombies. They might be a bit prettier than reod!Elantrians, but they can't get sustenance from food and are uniquely dependent upon their Breath-diet to survive, as opposed to normal Awakeners at the Fifth Heightening. Vasher even calls Returned "Spontaneous Sentient BioChromatic Manifestations in a Deceased Host." Yes! No! (look further down for why) I do like this idea of considering someone who aged unnaturally fast: think Robin Williams . Sadly, though, I think you're doing the wrong thing with it when you apply this analysis to TLR. The thing is, I think its very very wrong to say that "aging rapidly" is what actually happened when TLR had his atiumminds ripped away. Yes, the effect is the same, but Sazed describes it as "snapping back" to his real age, and I think that's the right way to talk about it. Consider any other Feruchemical effect: when you stop storing or tapping, you revert to normal as a matter of course. Your muscles deflate because that's just what they do, not because you are suddenly afflicted with the effects of a wasting disease. In fact, this leads to another insight: your muscles are described as inflating and deflating, not instantly being massive or small. At least where appropriate, then, it seems that Feruchemists (rapidly) traverse the stages between their two states, rather than instantaneously switching between them. Age, then, seems to work in the same way. Now a normal Feruchemist might take a second tor two to switch from 10 to 30. TLR had to go from ~30 to ~1050. It'll take some time. On top of that, I think we can allow for a bit of sluggishness since TLR's body was so very used to being not-a-pile-of-sticks. From this, I think describing TLR's "rapid aging" at the end of the FE as actual "aging, but really really rapid" is not right. They have the same effects, but radically different causes. -Though I'm a tad doubtful on the effects being truly identical. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a "rubber band" effect or some such where the "rate of change" is a bit different depending on how close you are to the start/end points. This as opposed to a linear rate of change from just "faster aging." See: My previous comments (which most others seem to agree on) about Breath as maintaining age against decay, not locking it in; also, the various quotes on how gaining more and more Breath gives you more and more of an "agelessness" effect, which basically locks some version of this interpretation in.

Yeah, we have some recent evidence. :P Maybe there's some kind of "hyperspace" going on, but this quote heavily indicates that it's not a case of using Shadesmar. You really don't need "spaceships" or "sci fi" to get away with using Shadesmar: in fact, you can't even access it in interplanetary space. If they were really just worldhopping, Scadrians would be better off with a Children of the Mind-style box with a fridge.

It tells us that there are real, fundamental connections and relationships between the Allomantic powers. You're right that, for all we know, the metals might break down differently for any given magic system. I doubt it, though, given the rather accurate Realmatic division along the same (in groups of 4) lines that Feruchemy achieves. Mostly, though, I was just replying to WeiryWriter's "[t]he allomantic groupings were ascribed to them by scholars, and so are not inherent characteristics" point.

I can roll with Rand/Meg's explanation for how spren function in different circumstances.

It's also of note that the Allomantic divisions of the metals is partially based on how they "feel" to Seekers. When Marsh is tutoring Vin, he says that you can identify Internal/External, Mental/Physical, and Pulling/Pushing based on various attributes of the pulses. The combination of these attributes is how you nail down a specific metal (IIRC, it's fast vs slow, long vs short, and <I can't remember>). He even says that this was used as part of the basis for why Tin is known as a Pulling metal. So there is definitely something right about the metal's division, even just using in-universe evidence.

The Recreance.

*Knocks on all the wood in the tri-county area*

Not world-hopping, world traveling. FTL will be a matter of propulsion, not Shadesmarian trickery.

Not quite, as presumably there's a limited amount of Splinters Endowment can give off, and s/he'd get wise eventually. Now, baby mills for lots of normal Breath. . .

Oh no, you can stick me with the "death" crowd as well. I don't think the Fifth Heightening is enough to sustain the a body that is essentially a pile of sticks: just because he can't age doesn't mean that a millenniarian can't keel over from a heart attack. TLR just won't become an even older pile of sticks. You're right there. Now if TLR had gotten to the Fifth Heightening before his age became unsustainable, I think he'd be fine forever. He does still benefit even if he got his Breath after getting to be unnaturally old, though, because then he no longer has to deal with the run-away diminishing returns due to an increasing base age that would have killed him eventually anyway. It would get rid of the "upper bound". Also, nice paragraph-long parenthetical. Interesting thoughts on what you can do with a non-wasted (seriously, spending a Splinter just to heal? Really?... ) Divine Breath. I think Hemalurgy could do the trick, and that Returned are almost certainly unique in needing to eat Breath in order to stay alive. Recall that it's the Returned who need to consume Breath, not their Divine Breath--they'll eat the Divine Breath itself if nothing else presents itself.