Kurkistan

Give me a dozen and I'll revolutionize war. Give me a hundred and I'll transform Alethikar's governance. Give me a thousand and I'll show you a new world. </overly poetic-ness>

I'll wait on your thoughts, Mr. Physics Brain. As for this being the beginning of an age of innovation, I agree. They could do some interesting things with lights, depending on how the fabrials actually work. I guess the main point of this thread (besides giving me a reason not to read Aristotle) is to highlight the incredible possibilities on a large scale brought about by Conjoiners. They're not just "plot radio" that lets important characters find things out in a timely manner occasionally: Conjoiners have the capacity--not even counting any other rediscovered magic or new technology--to single-handedly change the face of Roshar. EDIT: You done persuing? Okay. I don't think that they physically reorient on activation. I haven't read the book in a while (sorry about that), but I recall that users had to be careful to position the reeds just so before activating them or passing control to the other side. I think that, if you have one spanreed (Pen A) at a 90 degree angle (parallel to its floor) and its partner (Pen B.) is perpendicular to its floor, then, on activation, Pen A will not "write in the air" whenever Pen B (floor-pointing one) is writing on a piece of paper parallel to its floor. Instead, Pen A will move as if it were oriented properly: if you made a right angle by attaching a writing head to Pen A's gem (which is currently floating in midair above the floor), then that second pen would be writing the same message as Pen B. A piece of paper on an easel placed in front of Pen A will recording the scribbling of a mad man as it records the horizontal motion of Pen B--and that's only if it manages to be in the right place to be written on, as opposed to being to far away or being stabbed as pen B moves "down" or "up" its page. EDIT 2: Oops, got a few particulars wrong.

I had thought of using the light as a signal, but it's probably horrifyingly slow. It could be useful as an emergency beacon, come to think of it. If you have the rubies to spare or it's a particularly valuable agent, someone could just put a conjoined ruby in his pocket and have it turn on or off, discretely, to send particular, high-importance messages, e.g. "turn on once if by land, twice if by sea." As far as orientation goes, mainly I was saying that an upside-down receiver key probably won't do you much good, since it will try to go "down" towards the planet. I agree that each half most likely determines its local orientation (i.e. "down") based on Roshar, but they can't possibly share it directly ("still" is probably more particular), or differential rates of rotation (someone on the equator moves faster than someone on the poles) would do horrible things. Yeah, I thought I was all kinds of clever with the range idea and leverage. Oh well.

I also know very little about telegraphs, to tell the truth. Just enough to know that you're a lot better off with them than you are with simul-pens. You could have strips of paper that move under the head due to muscle-powered (or fabrial powered, even) wheels, I suppose. I'm sure they had some low-tech mechanism for doing it back in the good old days. Really, I was thinking a bit more of the stereotypical audible dits and dahs, then to be recorded by hand (or just interpreted on the fly). According to Wikipedia (our lord and savior), that's how the first generation of telegraphs did it, and even later the sound of the armature moving in and out of position to mark the paper was used to interpret the code before even looking at the page.

I forgive you, but only if the second thing was "Triple-awesome gem-studded goodness!" EDIT: Anyone else getting this weird thing where a ">/" shows up after your smilies every time you edit?

I just wrote up a frighteningly long reply to this, but then I realized that it was so awesome that it deserved its own thread.

It all started in the "the most useless uses for useful powers" thread. There I was, minding my own business, when fate struck: If you don't have electricity, that's actually a very good idea. Aren't those called spanreeds, and aren't they used for communication that's actually much more subtle than the telegraph ever was? Don't you be dissing the telegraph! Thread time! I understand that spanreeds exist, they're just slow, unreliable, finicky, expensive, and (most likely) have a limited range compared to telegraph keys. "Subtle" is an odd word here. Do you mean faster? More versatile? Telegraphs are better at everything! *froths* Message speed: Versality: Mechanical Advantages: Mobility and Orientation: Range: Crazy-land: Masculine Employment: Impacts: TL;DR: Using conjoiner fabrials to set up paired keys for telegraphy (preferably two sets of keys for each pair, for continuous and non-waiting input/output) is really awesome, and a much better idea (also more scale-able and more versatile) than writing out words with spanreeds. EDIT: As it turns out, writing out full messages with a pen is also technically telegraphy, by definition. Needless to say, I mean the more traditional, Morse-code style telegraphy with essentially a simple on/off switch. You could engineer vastly more complex systems (essentially replacing electrical signals with mechanical ones), but I focus on the simple ones.

If you don't have electricity, that's actually a very good idea.

Okay, I think we're wrapping up here (thanks Windrunner and happyman), so a few closing comments. First, it can be the case that a stamp doesn't "take" to such an extent that it never even works at all, for any length of time. Such as the stamp for Ashravan's motivation for becoming emperor never even "stamping" Gaotona the first try. I think "body: animate" would be such an improbable, non-starting stamp. Second, the only real "overarching magic system" I propose is the Cosmere as a whole and the nature of magic on Sel in particular, not some superset {Forging, Bloodsealing} that is a magic system in and of itself. I think that to say that Bloodsealing "fits under Forging" is just about as wrong as to say that Hemalurgy "fits under" Feruchemy.

The sole purpose of which other stamp is to turn something else into a stamp, and so on.

@name_here Thanks for backing me up, good points. Forging and Bloodsealing do not work in essentially the same way. Forging changes something's past. End of story. That's how every branch of Forging that Shai does or explains in any detail actually works. Forging and Bloodsealing have similar surface mechanisms in the stamps (like Hemalurgy and Feruchemy have similar media), but not much else in common. I like a good shave as much as the next guy, but what should we really be applying the razor to here? I'm suggesting that Shai is misinformed about the nature of Bloodsealing, which would obviously leave us a lack of mentions from her viewpoint about its true relationship with Forging. This is backed up by substantial evidence in-text of the two arts working in quite dissimilar ways. You, on the other hand, are going just on Shai's assumption that Bloodsealing is a subset of Forging, and postulating a rather large number of completely unexplained aberrations from the norm in order to maintain this. Your hypothesis requires that Bloodsealing differ from all "other" branches of Forgery very significantly to an unknown degree and for little explained reason, while mine (that Bloodsealing is its own magic) simply assumes that Shai can be mistaken. If Shai hadn't come out and said that Bloodsealing was Forging, and you just held the two systems up next to each other, would you really say that they were one and the same? Ah, my mistake. I had thought that the first post of yours that I quoted referred to bone-stamps mattering in Bloodsealing. Turns out that it didn't. Regardless, I think we have some evidence that bone-stamps do matter in Bloodsealing. Once again, I allowed that the Bloodsealer might simply have been being theatrical in using bone stamps. But, then again, that's going a bit far. He doesn't seem to have any other real interest in theatricality and it would probably help his image (not to mention make for a better stamp, if he used soulstone instead) if he didn't walk around using body parts as tools. It's not a clear question, though, I'll admit. Cultural norms or theatricality could play their part. Specifically, the blood that the Bloodsealer needs is Shai's. He then uses that blood in particular to ward against and track Shai. I suppose he could track a squid if you were quick about mixing the ink, but I doubt that Shai could manage it with Forging. Once again, I would like an explanation for how a magic system entirely concerned with changing an object's past could allow you to track anything. EDIT: Ah, name_here covered that too. Again, I just want to apply Occam's razor. I don't think you necessarily disagree with anything I said there, actually. I'm describing how Forging and Bloodsealing are most definitely related. You can argue that they're related even more so than I describe, but what I said was the bare minimum. Sorry, that wasn't a real point. The ":P/>" was meant to indicate that I was kidding. :P/> Yes we do, to a refreshingly detailed degree. We probably know Forging better now than we know any but the Mistborn magics. We know from Shai, through demonstration and discussion, how all the Forgery that she understands works, from souls to bodies to pots. They change the past. We see it happen, we know it can and will fail if you don't have enough plausibly based on an understanding of the target's past. Bloodsealing is in crazy-land with people-tracking and razor-skeletons. She's an authority on Forging (real Forging as I understand, just to be clear). Honestly, she reacts with the same superstition and dread towards Bloodsealing as others react to her own Forging--this is probably even an intentional parallel on Brandon's part, to show that Shai isn't just a perfectly enlightened individual in a sea of irrationality. I'll trust Shai until what she says doesn't make sense. Things stop to make sense when she's dowsed through her blood and animate skeletons attack her. Her explanation and demonstration of how Forging works simply doesn't allow for such things. In one breath, I say that Shai is an expert on Forging, having spent her entire life learning it, and in the next I'll say that such focus can produce tunnel vision when it comes to categorizing what is, in fact, a different magic system entirely. Shai hasn't told us everything about every branch of Forgery, but the kind of stuff that Bloodsealing does is pretty big. If Shai's description of Forgery is like her drawing a house: laying down the foundations, the number of windows, how to construct the roof--then not only has she failed to sketch out all the details of that house just yet, but she also forgot to mention another house that sits right next to it, and has a completely different architect. And has a lava moat. I can't just throw it out, but I consider it extremely plausible that we're just dealing with ignorance/intimidation in this. See name_here's post. See name_here, once again.

First of all, that's besides the point because we have it from half a dozen sources that Atium/Malatium are simply outside of the normal scheme of metal classifications, no matter how you might want to split them. Second, recall that Gold/Electrum are a base/alloy pair, and so are expected to have similar effects. Metal pairs within the Physical and Mental categories behave quite differently from each other. Brandon has even said that Chromium/Nicrosil shouldn't have been quite as 1:1 with Aluminum/Duraluminum in their effects as they are, but they were just too interesting to pass up.

Yeah, I started going to the front page first every time I go to the forums because I ran into that issue in the past.

A subset would be like how soul-Forging is basically the same process as Forging a rock, or Forging someone healthy, with the practices and knowledge of each subset of the broader "Forging" category being virtually identical. The only reason Shai can't Reseal is because she didn't put in the time to learn the human body well enough; similar to how her knowledge of painting, while necessary for Forging a painting, does not make "Paint-Forging" a different art (hur hur) altogether. *Mistborn Spoilers* "Simply a related magic system" means that there are fundamental differences on one or many levels, while some superficial similarities that are helpful for comparison and theorizing remain. The effects of Hemalurgically endowed Strength are comparable to Feruchemical Strength, and might even come about from a similar increase in some "strength" stat coming in from the Spiritual Realm or something when you get down to the basics, but the magic systems and their surface-level mechanisms are quite different. For instance, I think it's fair to assume that 26 hours is the same limit on human-related magic for each system in TES. I don't think that it's fair to assume that stamp-material mattters in Forging because it matters in Bloodsealing, especially since we've seen evidence that this is a difference between them. Now Feruchemical Pewter, on the other hand, is a subset of Feruchemy in general: it works by the same mechanisms and rules as all other parts of Feruchemy, with a few quirks to differentiate it but no fundamental difference between Pewter and any other Feruchemical power. The two magic systems in TES are related in that they are both form-based, end-positive investitures whose forms are actualized through the "stamping" of symbols on objects, and in that they both most likely draw upon the Dor. All of the magic systems on Sel, in fact, are probably fairly closely related because of their singular power source and end-positive, form-based nature. Actually, "Resealing was one of the few branches of Forgery that Shai hadn't studied in depth" (sorry, can't get the page number on the eBook). Not "several." I already addressed how these "different" Forgeries are rightly subsets of a broader "Forging" magic system when I addressed the difference between related and subsidiary magics. The problem is that, while all the branches of Forging proper that we've seen so far share far more similarities than they have differences, Bloodsealing is an extreme aberration off crying by itself several miles away while the "other" branches are just in different rooms of the same house. She's fallible. I see this more as a failure in the narrator than as a definite fact of worldbuilding. If you knew a great deal about your magic system, possibly didn't even know or credit the existence of completely different magic systems, and knew a bit about another magic system that shared some surface similarities with yours, then you would probably assume that they were the same system too. EDIT: I already mentioned the re-stamping similarity, mostly to note that it was just about the only real 1:1 similarity between the two systems. Moreover, the ultimate reason for the 26-hour limit is the changeability of individual humans, which could quite rightly be thought to affect multiple disparate magic systems. Shai changes into a different person every day, to such an extent that her blood no longer adequately characterizes her for the ward's purposes. Blood tracking, presumably, works by establishing some connection between someone's blood and the individual it once belonged to, akin to Gaotona's Spiritual connection to Ashravan. If the person the blood is supposed to connect to changes (as all people do at all times), then the blood no longer points to anything, and so stops working. 26 hours, then, is simply the longest time that any feasible connection between a representation of a Spiritual aspect and the aspect itself can be maintained. That's a threat that she has no capability or intention of following through on, based on her previous comments on the evils of Bloodsealing. But if everyone is under the misapprehension that the two arts are one, and the Bloodsealer is currently scared out of his sad little mind, then that threat might buy her a few hours head-start. She needs to stop the Bloodsealer from tracking her through her blood for the benefit of the Empire, but doesn't want to kill him. Since Shai doesn't know how to Bloodseal even if she wanted too--and I'm operating under the assumption that the denizens of the Rose Empire are simply mistaken when they say that the two magics are the same--Shaizan taking the Bloodsealer's blood doesn't provide much evidence of anything. See my previous comment on fallibility/unreliable narration. Please tell me how you would go about describing an alternate past for a skeleton such that that skeleton, instead of being an inanimate sack of bones, is instead an automaton of death obeying the whims of its creator. Because that's how Forging works. It's not "congratulations, you now have this attribute," it's "your past was different such that you are thus instead of so." In order for Forging to animate those skeletons by accessing another magic system, such a magic system would need to exist. The only thing that could even come close would be Awakening. No dice there, though (and not only because of the whole "another planet" thing): when Shaizan found the Bloodsealer, his eyes were "glazed by the shock of having his creatures destroyed in rapid succession." And no "control" seal was in evidence. So it's most likely the case that the Bloodsealer had direct control of/connection to his skeletons. Awakening doesn't work like that. EDIT: Yes, it could just be the normal "oh frell, my automatons of death just died in half a second" kind of shock, but I doubt it, and that still leaves how he tracked her by her blood in question. We also have that he was right there behind the skeletons hiding in a storage closet. That implies that proximity is necessary for his control of the skeletons, unlike with Lifeless. Perhaps he needed to be there to guide them to Shai, and/or was simply overconfident, but it seems that any state of confidence would still have him standing off to the side in the corridor, either ready to collect/gloat over Shai's body or to run when his skeleton's engaged her, since his task of guiding them was done. Neither state of confidence results in hiding in a closet unless the Bloodsealer needed to go "out of body" to some degree in order to control his creations. --- Beyond that, no magic system that we know of (and probably none on Sel, given how we've seen magic working there so far) allows "wards" or tracking of people through their blood. Beyond that, I imagine that Forging anything so that it was profoundly affected by yet another magic system tends to strain credulity as far as the universe is concerned. The Bloodsealer would have had to construct a plausible narrative of an Awakener coming to Sel and giving command of a Lifeless (after putting in several exceptionally precious Breaths to Awaken it) to that same Bloodsealer. It's the same for drawing upon another magic system for tracking Shai: he would have needed to construct a plausible narrative of yet another magic user--who is apparently harder to access for the Empire than a Bloodsealer, since they didn't just call on that other magic user in the first place--doing the magic for him. This all assuming that using magic to use other magic is even allowed under Forgery: it might be the case that no amount of the Dor can make someone into a Mistborn, for instance.

I don't think the need to re-stamp needs to be quite that fundamental. An pseudo-Elantrian would most likely want to retain his mind/memories, and could simply remember to re-stamp him/herself on a regular basis. The Emperor didn't have "though must stamp thyself" embedded in his consciousness: he had to told and remember it. While the Forgery might fail for a number of reasons, the need to re-stamp wouldn't be one of them. We actually have an answer to that one. No. It has to do with Cogitive aspects and conceptions of what it is to be healthy.

Just a quick correction here, then I'll let you two get back to it. You make the rather dubious assumption that Bloodsealing is a subset of Forging, rather than simply a related magic system. Beyond their mutual need to impress symbols on objects in order to "magicize" them and (most likely) a similar 26-hour constraint on human-involved magic, the two systems are highly dissimilar. First of all, Forgeries do not appear to maintain any connection to their creator, nor does their appear to be a way for a Forgeries creator (or anyone else, for that matter) to monitor a Forgery. The Bloodsealer uses his "door ward" to know when Shai crosses the threshold, and feels it when his skeleton-soldiers are destroyed by Shaizan. Second, Forger's stamps do not, in fact, depend in any way upon the surface which they are carved on. Shai notes that soulstone is prized because of its ability to be cleanly carved and then hardened, not for any other properties. The only benefit of using "better" stamp material is to get a cleaner and longer-lasting stamp. You could probably carve a soul-changing stamp out of a bar of soap if you were careful with it. On the other hand (unless the Bloodsealer is just feeling morbid/theatrical that day), Bloodsealing appears to require bone-stamps. Third, they work in fundamentally different ways. Forgery works by changing an objects history, with efficacy depending on the plausibility of that adjusted history. It doesn't give that object magical properties as far as the world is concerned, it simply transforms it (one time only) into a different version of itself. Bloodsealing, on the other hand, establishes ongoing and controllable connections to people: from tracking someone by their blood to warding a door against them to animating (and controlling directly?) human skeletons. In no world could Forging convince a skeleton that it is, in fact, animate and at the control of its creator. The plausibility of such a proposition is nearly negative. Fourth, Forging of any type seems to work for any organic-ink, though to varying degrees, while Bloodsealing requires blood specifically (and in doing so establishes non-Forge-y connections to the blood's "donor"). Because of these differences, but mostly because of the first and third ones, I contest that Bloodsealing is a unique brand of magic all its own, potentially related to but certainly not derived from Forging. P.S. And I'm allowed to derail this thread because it's my thread, so hah!

Recall that, as quoted above, accessing the Dor at all is regionally influenced.

I doubt he stole the copy. If he just wanted a good Forgery, he could have gone to any number of legitimate Forgers or just asked Shai to Forge something for him directly. Also, and more importantly, Shai thinks to herself that most proper forgeries (as in the deceptive kind) have to be done without Forging if they're going to pass muster, since the soulstamp always has to go somewhere. The Arbiters knew Shai was a Forger and that she was trying to steal the Moon Scepter, and tell her that she failed to replace it, causing Shai to assume that they'd been fooled by the skill of her forgery. If there had been a soulstamp on Shai's intended replacement, then she would not have been so confident of it passing muster. I suppose she could have been mistaken in thinking that Hoid replaced the original Moon Scepter, and that Shai's intended replacement could have been a Forgery, but I think she would have thought of it when she considered the "paradox of Forging" in that the stamp is always visible, something along the lines of "for the Moon Scepter, she'd hidden the stamp ________".

I don't think that there is such a thing as a "powerful" stamp. The only differentiation we've seen has been plausibility. That plausibility has been somewhat dependent on complexity, but it seems that plausibility is really the only thing that matters at the end of the day. If a stamp that makes a desk shinier isn't "powerful" enough to change the world, then no stamp, no matter the complexity, will be any more powerful.

It may be the case that time bubbles have some interesting spatial effects, what with the whole space-time thing, so a warp drive for propulsion may be in the future. Don't give up hope! The whole "nothing goes 0mph" thing is the problem, actually. You need some frame of reference before you can start throwing around things going faster just because they experience time differently. Velocity is distance over time, true, but that doesn't work by itself when time bubbles come into play. As I discussed in the specific post I linked to a bit farther down, an object's "speed up" is necessarily a function of how fast its frame of reference is going. If the object is going c relative to the bubble, then it may well be able to travel at 20c for a brief moment before it exits the bubble. If, however, the bubble is moving with the object, then the object is not actually traveling as far as the time bubble is concerned, and so does not accelerate in any frame of reference, leaving us with an effective maximum speed of c again. The example I used to illustrate this was two objects motionless relative to each other in space. From one perspective, where the objects are motionless, a bubble put up around one of the objects shouldn't affect their relative position at all. But from a perspective where each object is "moving" at 1mph, a bubble around one of them will most definitely affect their relative position. Therefore, frame of reference is key for calculations of how much farther an object moves while under the effect of a time bubble than it would normally, and objects which are stationary relative to the bubble do not care either way. I do not recall the quote for the first one, and cannot find it in the Q&A. Could you please pull the link? As for the second: ah. I misunderstood you there. You could also use Iron Feruchemists for infinite free energy much more easily, btw. Fair enough. The more theories the merrier. Brandon has said that FTL is "built into [allomancy and feruchemy]", though, so I doubt that he'll just pull something out of thin air to explain it away when the day comes. Brandon's answer was most definitely the ground, actually. It might be different in space, without the vehicle having to compete with a planet for the bubble's attention, but it's not a sure thing.

Yeah, where they anchor is a good question. Given their strongly Cogntive nature so far, I would hazard that they anchor to whatever the caster thinks of as the ground/un-moving. Frame of reference is fun, as I found to my dismay. This one makes some sense, I think. Imagine Wayne throwing up a speed bubble while he is inside a cadmium bubble, moving 1/20th his normal speed. If he throws up a speed bubble (much smaller than and wholly contained within the cadmium bubble), then he'll appear to move (about) 20 times as fast as everyone else within the cadmium bubble, and about normal speed from the outside. The areas of overlap cancel, but not the entirety of both bubbles. This is covered in the RPG as well, if I recall correctly.

I'm having a bit of trouble visualizing this, sorry. I agree that a cadmium bubble could help with journey time by slowing the perceived time passed on the ship, but how exactly does any interaction of the bubbles actually get the ship itself moving >c in a normal frame of reference (or any frame of reference, really)? One thing to keep in mind is that it is logically necessary that the "speed up" or "slow down" caused by time bubbles is all in relation to the frame of reference of wherever the bubble is anchored. So if a time bubble is moving through space with the ship, that ship will be moving the same speed no matter how many or what kind of bubbles you put around it (that speed being 0 mph from the ship's frame of reference and something <c from any other frame of reference). As far as the Cognitive stuff goes, we really don't need to deal too much with it. We know that Cognitive aspects determine what's inside and what's outside the bubble, but I don't think they affect much beyond that. I haven't seen these two yet. Could you link the interview, please?

Could you please explain how that would work, specifically?

I couldn't find any other "fan question marks." As a general note, it would be helpful if you could throw in time-stamps for those "[?]" sections (maybe [? 21:37] or something), so that it's easier to find them in the audio.

Okay, I did what I could so far. One of the question marks was "Mistborn" and the other was spelled Urteau. I also took the liberty of fixing "over-arcing" (it's just written overarching) and de-Canadianizing one of the questions, for readability's sake.