Kurkistan

I don't think Seon's are actually negatively affected by the chasm unless their owner's get Reod'ed. Raodin's goes back to normal once he goes full Elantrian, and there's no comment in general that Seons had been changed by the initial appearance of the chasm.

He's a smidgen unclear on it, but leaning towards "one:" Link I'm not so sure about your second line. TLR moved planets around, so he had a fair amount of juice, and he was able to do some mind-boggling genetic engineering population-wide with no time and less experience. EDIT: Second quote, much more clearly saying Sazed is not of a different type. Link

Yes, but the limit could be a basic "shard-brain" rather than "holding X amount of Shardic power => getting Y brain power." Sazed essentially changed types, from "human" to "Shard," and so got a bigger consciousness. We know that Brandon considers Harmony to be a single Shard, at its core, so we're still in the ballpark of "Shard" rather than Sazed having transcended to an altogether new type of being, a "Shard 2.0."

Harmony's mind isn't necessarily "bigger" than Odium's in any significant sense. A taller person has more body to manage, but that doesn't mean that they're smarter. It could also be the case that, even if Sazed's cognitive aspect as Harmony is larger than Rayse holding a single shard, that "extra brain" could all be dedicated purely to managing his excess power, rather than being applicable to thought.

Yes.

Too complicated *grumble grumble* not enough space on the screen, *grumble, storming ARC-readers, grumble grumble* I'd say.

No problem. I did it at least partially for my own sake, since I loathe having to hunt quotes down, yet love being able to do a simple CTRL+F.

While I would love to think of my triumph (*Muwhahahah!!*) as a Frequently Asked Question, I don't think it quite qualifies. I guess I can put it in if no one else posts anything. At least then I won't have to do it. *shudder*

So the AMA seems to be winding down, and I know I don't like sifting through a thousand replies to find Cosmere-related stuff, so I've been bookmarking anything even vaguely Cosmere-related up until about 18:00 UTC on the 18th, and here are the results. Please grab quotes and links that you want to spin or substantiate theories off of and link directly to reddit in other threads, rather than to this mondo-thread of death. This is really just meant to be a resource. I imagine this will all be thrown on the Theoryland database fairly soon, but I'm impatient and I also imagine this might help those guys when they get to it. EDIT: Added 3 more on April 28. Please note that these divisions are relatively arbitrary, so look carefully if you're desperate for new information.

Fair enough. I hadn't considered the deflection bubbles cause.

I'm a little wary of this "technomagic." Brandon said it was "a more mechanical method", but I'm unsure as to how non-living entities are supposed to access the power of Preservation that Leras imbued sentient creatures with. If there is some way to do "super bubbles" with machinery, though, I'm all for it. I think Identity might be a bit more personal than that. I can't really think of a better metal, though. ---- As an aside, I realize now that I haven't properly considered just how powerful the multiplicative effect of time bubble overlap is. Who needs to accelerate ships to near light speed? If you get a ship up to 1% of c (about 100 times faster than the pioneer probe, and we weren't trying that hard with that one), you can layer on just two bendalloy bubbles with compression factors of 10 (which is a conservative estimate) and get up to c. Saves you a lot of energy and high-energy collisions on the way to your destination for exceptionally little cost. Add on another 2 bubbles and you're going 100 times c. Another 2 and your going 10,000. With just half-a-dozen overlapping bendalloy (and cadmium, for sanity/life's sake) bubbles, you can go a light year in less than an hour with a negligible starting speed. Add on a few more if you want to start slower and/or travel faster. This seems a bit too powerful...

So Brandon has been mentioning Brian McClellan's Promise of Blood for a bit now because McClellan is a former student of his. I had some down time and picked it up the other day. Does anyone want to share thoughts? Myself, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the book. The prose was a bit overwrought at times, and the pacing wasn't exactly perfect, but it kept me reading and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Welcome to the forums! An admin should be around to spike cookie you shortly! Time commitment is a bit odd for these forums. In my experience, it takes a fair amount of time to become "Cosmere literate", mainly because there's just so many different resources to look at (the Theoryland database, old threads, annotations, the Coppermind, etc.). Such a knowledge base isn't strictly necessary, though: you don't have to pour an encyclopedia into your brain just to start posting. We have some some fairly interesting theory discussions with relatively small knowledge bases, and more "plotty" discussions don't usually tend to involve deep metaphysical knowledge. As far as normal participation goes, once you get as far up to speed as you want to be, we have a fairly small turnover so far as how fast people post. You can easily catch up on a days worth of activity in a few minutes, most of the time. This is all from my (highly skewed) perspective, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

^I don't have the books on me, but I believe that Sazed thought it akin to moving through molasses or something when he was storing, though I don't recall us seeing him actually tap speed. So yes, more like quick vs. sluggish movements than absolute velocity.

It's not just health that suffers from "surging" disproportionate amounts: it's every feruchemical attribute. You waste energy "compounding" (Brandon's confusing word choice, not mine) the extra ferucemical energy you draw on.

Sounds like an excellent question to put in an FAQ... EDIT: Oops, never mind, it's already been submitted.

There are sketches of sky eels in the book.

Okay, sorry I misread you. I think you've got it about right. As for the nitty-gritty of my "distension theory": it's really not that well developed. The plasticity of the bubbles, whether they re-form around objects (creating a tunnel-like effect in some cases, actually) and other questions are not answered. I would hazard that two halves of a bubble can and do "meet up" on the other side of some objects: such as a (very firmly rooted, but thin) poll stuck in the ground right next to the misting not splitting his time bubble in half.

@Senor The way to resolve this conflict easily is to subscribe to distension: the javelin is distending the surface of the bubble. The thing is, I can't really see a pure "tunnel method" working out that well, now that I think of it. I'll giver you a scenario: Wayne is on a train and wants to throw up a bendalloy bubble. We know that he'll very quickly be pulled out of the bubble (popping it) because the train is moving and the bubble is stationary relative to the ground, but we only really need the bubble to exist for long enough to speed up his watch by half a second. Now, if some "tunnel" theory holds, the train, since it is not effected, is punching a hole clear through the middle of Wayne's bubble. So anything outside the boundaries of the train should be affected, but not the train, nor its occupants. Therefore, Wayne doesn't get to feel any effect from his bubble, because it has been cancelled around him. This raises an additional problem that Wayne will never actually reach the "edge" of his bubble, simply its virtual edge where the bubble should end if it hadn't been occluded by the train. Not a crippling problem, but worrying considering that we know he'll be "pulled out of it, then it would vanish." Under a distension theory, however, the bubble is "squeezed" within the confines of the train: it begins its existence at Wayne, then expands until it hits the inside edges of the too-large train. This way, the bubble still exists within the train and can affect people within the train, but some externally-cast bubble would still be incapable of "reaching into" the train from the outside. So Wayne's watch goes forward a tick (and he shoots the length of the bubble in half an instant as he's accelerated (relative to the train) at 8x30mph) and order is restored to the universe. Does this make sense, or do you still dislike the distension theory?

They're anchored to the planet via a spiritual bond similar to the one that gravity manifests as. Assuming that the bubble doesn't automatically latch onto the strongest gravitational-spiritual bond the misting has, what frame of reference the bubble latches onto probably has to do with what the misting (cognitively) "sees" as unmoving. Source

I don't think so, Phantom, at least not exactly. It's my read that bubbles are "present" in physical space, to some extent, instead of just being a spherical manifestation of cognitive effects. My gut just says no. I'll try to make my gut a bit more sensible, though. It doesn't really seem that time bubbles are very present in the Cognitive Realm. They inherit many of their features from Cognitive aspects (frame of reference, who/what is in or out), sure, but I think their actual active impact is on the Spiritual (then flowing to the other two Realms), to go in line with how the quadrants are broken down and my own pet theory of how magic works, Realmatically. Incidentally, this recalled to me a fact I saw in the AMA. I had been planning on waiting until all was said and done before just posting everything, but this is an appropriate context: Source So people don't get a choice about whether or not to be inside the bubble, unlike trains. This also pretty much confirms some variation on my distension theory, since we know that people on the train wouldn't be affected; which means that they don't even come into contact with the bubble because the train messes with its surface in some way. So the train either distorts the bubble around it or, at the very least, punches a whole clean through. It isn't simply "in" the bubble but not affected by it.

That's after factoring in frame of reference's effect on to what degree objects' motions are accelerated, right? EDIT: Just had a weird secondary thought on that, actually. Scenario: A ship is flying through space with a time bubble expanded around it and anchored to it, so the ship is motionless relative to the bubble. If that ship goes through a "wall" of particles traveling towards it, then its bubble should result in parts of the wall "bulging" either towards the origin of the ship (if it's a bendalloy bubble) or away from it (if it's a cadmium bubble). Is that an acceptable result? I think it is, but something about it gave me a moment of disquiet when I first thought of it. EDIT 2: Just to be clear, the possible problem is that, from the wall's perspective, this time bubble just shot through them and suddenly some otherwise stationary particles started moving around for awhile. Also, the "wall" oughtn't be a singular entity, Cognitively, Before: ____| ____| >___| ____| ____| After: ____| ___| __|____> ___| ____|

Sure. Have an upvote. I'm Kurkistan there too.

There are some resources here: http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/3074-chapter-symbols-in-mistborn-woa-and-hoa/

Kal's looking a bit feral these days.