Kurkistan

I'm not sure if this is old, old news, but I just noticed this tidbit from the interview database: If this isn't simply Brandon misspeaking, then this implies that only Scadralians can actually use Hemalurgy, at least to one degree or another. It could mean that a Scadralian needs to be the onle to place the spike (in the victim and/or the recipient) and/or it could be that a Scadrialian is the only one who can benefit from a spike. We already know that spikes can steal anything they please, so you don't need to be special to be a victim of Hemalurgy. Any way you slice it, it makes spikes a bit less "oh, you got a metal splinter? There goes your magic!" and a bit more deliberate. I'm inclined to think that this means that only sentient Scadralians can actually create Hemalurgic spikes, and that they must be in contact with the spike at the moment when they use it on their victim. This would explain why bullets haven't spiked out Mile's Augur or Bloodmaker abilities yet, at the very least. We then have this possibly conflicting bit: Eh. Could go either way. He doesn't specify Hemalurgy as the one that people could discover by accident, so it could just be that you'd need some worldhopper DNA before you could do anything. --- Just wanted to get this out there and spur some discussion, back the Shardblades and Hemalurgic decay!

First of all, every other Cosmerian's (?) "default" level is fundamentally human and their minds are fundamentally the same. The Skaa of Luthadel weren't beaten down because that's just how Skaa are, they were beaten down because they were being constantly Soothed (and because they were under the iron rule of an evil God Emperor). Second, it's usually just the active magic-users who get benefits. Joe down the street is the same as Bob down the other street. If King's theory is correct, than every single Nalthian is fundamentally a healthier, more driven, and less irritable person, as well as having fundamentally better perception of color and of others' life forces.

Sorry if someone else already said this and/or if I'm misunderstanding points, but let me just throw in my 2 cents and then run away very very quickly. My impression about Hemalurgic decay for Feruchemy was that tapping is all that would be directly affected, with seemingly "slow" storage rates as a mere side effect. We had that mondo-discussion about "surging" in Feruchemy, remember? But it all originated in a thread about Hemalurgy and Feruchemy. The original topic was quickly buried under a wave of proposed jargon, but we even more quickly concluded that the energy lost from "surging" Feruchemcial abilities was determined by the strength of the Feruchemist. So a hBloodmaker might simply be counted as a weak Feruchemist--losing a large amount of energy when surging time-scuttled power at a greater rate than when he put it in. So all Feruchemists can draw at or lower than the rate that they put an attribute into a metalmind without wastage, but hFeruchemists have a greater cost when they draw at a higher rate, Sazed might be able to store 20% health for an hour in order to get an extra 500% for a minutes (just random percentages of loss, here), but a Catquisitor will only get 400% for that same minute because he is a fundamentally weaker Feruchemist. It might also be the case that weaker Feruchemist can't even manage a 1:1 transfer, but I doubt it, since that would take us outside of the strong->weak continuum for Feruchemy that holds well enough in Allomancy.

And what about a Drab's complete lack of a life sense?

Understandable. This is a big old topic, so I think it can keep for a bit until you have your diagrams done. Oh, you mean this dictionary?

JUST?!?!?!?!???? *Starts to froth*

Thanks for the link. Have you seen anything new over there? Also, it's kind of odd to see a site without any explicit broader Cosmere-awareness talking about one of Brandon's books.

I think that Nalthians are just at a normal level when they have a Breath, and that the magic system simply enables them to give up some part of their natural Spiritual energy. Note that among the other consequences of being a Drab is that you have no "life sense" and people cannot sense you in turn. Brandon has said that he took this from the real-life belief that people can tell when they're being watched, when someone else is in the room, etc. Presumably a Rosharian would also have the normal, "1-Breath" level of this ability, as a normal human would, rather than not having a life sense at all. EDIT: Also, just thematically, I doubt that Brandon would want the peoples of one of the worlds to be fundamentally different--fundamentally more capable, really--than those of any of the others. In the end, he is telling human stories, and so wouldn't want to make the entirety of one of his books about super-human (in terms of disposition, drive, etc. at least ) characters, or to elevate Nalthians to essentially being a race of Ubermensch as compared to the rest of the Cosmere.

The reason I asked that second question was mostly for the sake of "and its occupants." If I hadn't asked that, then I would know whether the train itself would be affected, but not whether or not it's occupants would be. The first two sentences of his answer were about that train; the train was the large object that Brandon was referring to. "Not noticing" while still being under the bubble's influence is also a bit more of a stretch for a full-sized train than for a piece of wood. Crossing over to Florida doesn't involve all of the cars on the road ending up essentially bumper-to-bumper as each car in turn seems to just about stop as it crosses the boundary. It is unnecessary and harmful to the cohesiveness of the magic system for the entire train to be engulfed by a time bubble, as well as a somewhat stretchy interpretation of the quote, so I am unsure as to why you're so in favor of such a system. Sanderson likes to break the laws of nature in a consistent and understandable manner. He doesn't need to do stuff weirdly in this case, so why should he? Also, a fair amount of his readers are quite interested in physics . It's actually much easier to see a train being entirely excluded from a bubble (perhaps distending its surface, as I linked to in the OP) than to have to explain why a mile-long train is affected by a hundred yard time bubble.

But the question is the nature of that strengthening. The book makes it clear that Shardblades cut through anything and everything without the slightest resistance. It doesn't care that you're shield is suddenly as strong as adamantium: if it's still just a physical shield, it's still useless.

I shall await your pretty pretty colors. (With no 'u', you Brit )

First of all, you seem to have omitted half of the question for some reason: In general, a large object going through a time bubble is not going to notice. An object is either in or out, and it depends in part on how the object views itself. People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble. The spear would go from one to the other, but would never be in both. So the second question and the answer about the train are both actually about whether or not the train is ever in the bubble, not about it crossing the edge. What was your reason for excluding the second question? --- Also, I think Brandon would have been clearer if he meant that the entire train slowed down. He never answers questions in a deliberately misleading fashion, which I think your interpretation would require. --- I also highly doubt your interpretation simply because of it's implications. I give you a train stretched out over 1/4 mile of track going at considerable speed. I also give you a 100 yard diameter Cadmium bubble (a bit big, I think, but that's from the RPG). If you encompass 100 yards of train, you still have 340 yards of train outside of the bubble's normal area of effect. So you either extend the bubble to cover 4 times it's normal area so that the entire train is within it, or you simply don't put any of the train inside the bubble at all. Anything else results in John having a very bad day, on one scale or another. If you think that the bubble extending to be 4 times bigger is fair, then I'll just extend the train to 1/2 mile or a full mile and so on until you don't think it's fair. If you never reach the bounds of fairness, I give you the planet Scadrial.

Yeah, that's essentially my conclusion as well. So the Basic and Reverse Lashings mess with the Spiritual aspects of whatever they target, using Stormlight to fuel an abnormal change in how they interact with other objects. *cough* theory *cough*

That's how I saw it as well. I was responding to Aethling by showing him what his ruleset would entail. Our two option that I see right now are either the train just keeping its passengers out of the bubble by fiat or the passengers keeping themselves out of the bubble as a consequence of perceiving themselves as within the train. They can't be anchored to a moving object, no, but they can affect moving objects, ala bullets.

He said "People inside the train would be inside of its influence, and wouldn't notice the bubble." "It" has to be the train because that sentence was a new line of discussion and no other singular inanimate noun had been used up until that point. So people inside the train are under the train's influence. Here is what I envision when you say that people inside the train are affected by the Cadmium bubble while the train itself is not: John is standing in the aisle of a train travelling at 60 mph, but feels like he is at rest and does not experience any acceleration. Marasi throws up a Cadmium bubble which encompasses John and the train car he is in. The train doesn't react at all and is completely outside of the bubble's effect. John, on the other hand, is suddenly traveling at 3 mph (60/20) relative to the outside world and at 0 mph relative to the floor of the train which is travelling at 57 mph beneath him. John is then hit by the interior wall of the train travelling at 57 mph relative to him. John dies or otherwise suffers serious injury. In the moments before he lost consciousness, while a train wall is flying up to hit him in the face, John notices that something is amiss.

I'm really not that old of a hand here. You'd be better off PM'ing Chaos or KChan or someone else who's been here since the dawn of time. I haven't heard anything like that to my knowledge, though. People don't really talk about Warebreaker much.

That's where my interpretation came from, actually. That's an interesting connection, but I agree that it's probably just coincidence. (Just wait and see that it's totally not a coincidence now that I've said it is ).

To clarify, Breaths only output a fraction of their total power at any given time, but that fraction is the amount that they can naturally regenerate/reuse. Nightblood and Returned, then, simply use more of a Breath's power than it can regenerate, destroying the Breath in the process.

That could well be the case, I agree, and was basically what I was getting at. But sentience has very little to do with either of those activities.

Interesting thought, but I don't think so. Nightblood is perfectly fine being sentient and reading minds and whatnot the vast majority of the time: he only eats Breath when he's being super-sword.

I don't think we're in too deep of a pit here with "how an object perceives itself." My first impression from that was more of a sense of location/belonging than anything else. So each part of the arrow perceives itself as part of the arrow as a whole, passengers on a train perceive themselves as within the train, etc.

Yeah, normal Awakening not destroying Breath is a big discrepancy. Remember, as Windrunner said, that color is only used at the moment of Awakening (or Cognitive transferance, under my model). That Lifeless squirrel will keep squirreling around until it falls to dust, all without requiring additional Breath or color. I think that Breaths are simply a power source in their own right. They may technically get their power from elsewhere, but I think that they are essentially Spiritual manifestations which are fundamentally a source of energy, not just keys to the door. Returned and Nightblood might just be greedy about it, destroying a Breath now to get all of the energy it has instead of taking what the Breath gives, like emptying a bank account to buy a yacht instead of living off the interest. We also know from the Q&A that Awakening and Surgebinding "share some defining fundamentals," by the way.

Yeah, magic is obviously ideal, but we laugh at such wastefulness! I had the impression that the Reverse Lashing's strength was somehow a function of the speed of the object being pulled, but I don't see any evidence for that after a quick check of the book. It's described as just "anything that approaches," and we saw Kaladin pull arrows from halfway across the world with a Reverse LAshing. So that does hurt quicklime a bit. There's still hope, though. We know that air isn't pulled in by Reverse Lashings, and that the Reverse Lashing won't help if you manage to get anything resembling an encirclement, so a well-thrown quicklime grenade or two that "poofs" such as to distribute the chemical all around a Windrunner could still do the trick, or even just a relatively stationary cloud of quicklime, if it won't be affected because it's relatively stationary and not really "approaching" the Windrunner.

Okay, thank you for that much-less-situational and expensive addition to the conversation. Quicklime. Good idea. I can see (very carefully handled and stored) quicklime grenades being useful against Windrunners, if not even regular combat troops. Obscure the Windrunner's ability to breathe (though they don't do that much) and see, and you've definitely cut down on their responsiveness and agility. And a reverse lashing probably won't do that much against what amounts to a cloud. You have just given us a highly practical solution to dealing with Windrunners on the battlefield, though it's still not as easy, ranged, or simply as using crossbows on Shardbearers in general, sadly. The problem is Alethi access/knowledge about quicklime or other such chemicals, as well as that pesky "honor" thing that has stopped the use of quicklime in the past.

Some new answers that I noticed: All of the magic systems are related, and these two do share some defining fundamentals. Now color me interested from this one. I would not have picked Awakening + Surgebinding if I was to chose two fundamentally similar magic systems. Perhaps it's the internalization and conscious reshaping of Shardic power (Breath/Stormlight). But that's not very fundamental. Unless my model of Awakening is fundamentally wrong on the Cognitive/Spiritual division (which I doubt), I don't see much simlarity on how they work, since Surgebinding so far seems to be focused around altering Spiritual aspects, while Awakening simply tacks some extra power onto Spiritual aspects while doing most of its heavy lifting in the Cognitive realm. I suppose soulcasting could be mainly Cognitive in that the "souls" of inanimate objects may stay the same when they transform. Anyone have some thoughts on this quote? The blood being in motion is part of it. Not sure what to make of this. It's probably important, though. Anyone else have an idea? Okay, I see where you're coming from now. I agree that the idea of "forms" and what they entail will probably be fundamental to any complete understanding of the magic systems. I misunderstood and thought that you were proposing more of a 1:1 correspondence. EDIT: Also, interesting tidbit from the Q&A: This has to do with the nature of the magics in the cosmere. They interfere with one another. Something that contains a lot of power--we call it investiture--resists the efforts of magic to influence it. A strong spirit can interfere as well. That's interesting. It would explain the difficulty of Pushing/Pulling on embedded metals in Allomancy. Perhaps you ought to rework your "cell" theory, Odium, and talk about relative strength of the Spiritual aspect itself?