Kurkistan

There's nothing stopping you from asking your question during the general Q&A, but the sense I've gotten (not that I'm the most experienced signing-goer) is that the general Q&A is more for the "crowd friendly" questions that everyone, not just us crazy people, could appreciate the answer to. I know I'd feel a bit awkward if I stood up during the general Q&A and asked "Would Feruchemical gold or Allomantic aluminum be a more appropriate cure for someone withered by a shade?" or the like. You can and should ask questions when he signs your books, so you'll not lack for the opportunity if you don't get a question in during the general Q&A.

I wasn't before, but now I can't unsee it.

Yes but I had a link so there.

It was my impression as well that Kae was much smaller. Then again, this map's scaling could be a blatant lie meant to inflate the importance of Kae in its own right after the Reod, as the text in the bottom-rigth is doing. Then again again, Aon Rao looks to show the central shape and the surrounding circles as being about the same size.

A fair assumption. Alternatively, it could just be prohibitively difficult to do so, or his lack of ability to worldhop is temporary.

It would appear that metals burn at a rate that aligns with time subjective to the allomancer. So if you have a pair of Coinshots each with 10 minutes of steel, then start both of them burning and put one inside a 10x Bendalloy bubble, one minute later the one outside the bubble will have 9 minutes left and the one inside of it will be out. Even without needing to interpret the linked WoP, we've seen no evidence that Allomancers inside fast/slow bubbles experience odd burn rates. Wayne's a bad example because he'd be used to it, but Wax never indicates anything about changed burn rates while inside of Wayne's speed bubble, and while it's not a perfect example since he might just not have burned Allomantic gold during that period, Miles never notices when he's put inside Marasi's slow bubble.

I'm not quite so sure on the assumption that duralumin effects would last longer inside a bendalloy bubble.

Yeah, Brandon seems to have been proud of himself for that one. Source:

Well apparently Marsh has been gallivanting about down South for the last while, so him coming back and suddenly deciding that Wax needs to know about Hemalurgy certainly seems suggestive.

Then again, trick #0 for Ruin was making people irrationally keep their spikes in, from Vin to Spook. So Wax "just happening" to keep the earring in after praying the night before or something is entirely in the realm of possibility if someone stole Ruin's playbook.

An excellent thought: here I was thinking of how you'd have to do some shenanigans to get your potential targets spiked, but every Pathian is already going to be spiking themselves every time they pray, giving them the Flaw and opening themselves to influence.

@ccstat Quite right, I'd forgotten that. Not!Daguerreotype's aren't quite suited to use by the press, though, so at the very least it looks like any photography they have is likely behind the curve. -- Another thing is that apparently none of us were surprised enough at Spook writing the book on Hemalurgy to think it worth commenting on it, which I find a bit amusing.

That is interesting, especially considering how advanced gunpowder, metallurgy, cars, etc. imply a fairly sophisticated depth to Scadrian understanding of chemistry.

Question of the day: when/how did her brother die? Because if I was an evil organization looking to Hemalurgically/Allomantically manipulate a specific Steelrunner, I might do my research and then potentially engineer some emotional trauma (and potentially get a spike along the way from the brother) to make her easier to dupe.

It really seems like somebody is doing some serious Ruin-level puppeteering/influencing here, it's just disturbing to contemplate who exactly is doing it, and how they're sneaking it by Harmony. Maybe the Southerners are more sophisticated than we've been (kind of) assuming? So rather than just having some machines that can do a steelpush if you push a button, they have sophisticated mechanical implementations of emotional Allomancy that can mimic the hallucinations and urges that Ruin was able to create? This of course assumes some kind of Southern-related conspiracy to infiltrate/invade the North; either that or someone in the North got ahold of mechallomancy. I suppose it's also possible that a very skilled Soother/Rioter who knows exactly what he's doing could go also exploit the Flaw this subtly. They can already take Hemalurgic-constructs over wholesale just like Ruin can, so it stands to reason that they might be able to be more fine-grained about it to. Even if your target needs the Flaw in order to be manipulated, it certainly broadens the suspect pool from our current choices of "maybe Harmony turned evil?" or "unknown but Harmony-bypassing Shard." Just subtly put a spike or two in a few people and a vanilla mortal with connections and knowledge can have them go all Penrod on Elendel. Also: Confirmation that bullets deflect on their way out of slow bubbles. Fairly intuitive, but not confirmed yet. EDIT: Also increases the likelihood that bullets deflect going both ways through both kinds of bubbles. Now we've seen deflection out of both speed bubbles and slow bubbles: so passing fast->slow and slow->fast both deflect. Either it's a bullets-leaving-bubbles thing or I'd wager that it's universal for crossing the boundary.

@Moogle To be clear, I was talking about the leakage stopping when you put the spike into the recipient. So the idea (by my understanding) was that because Vin got spiked almost right after the earring was made into a spike, this would then stop all further leakage of power from the spike so long as Vin was alive. This theory becomes a lot less likely if a dead person's blood coating the spike is all it takes to stop leakage. The blood serving as some kind of Spiritual barrier isn't necessarily incompatible with the "bonding means no leakage" theory, but it does start to threaten it with Occam's razor. @Argent Kandra hemalurgy is possible, but not known. It's unclear what time-frame this "knowage" is based on in Brandon's reply. Source:

The blood thing is fairly revelatory, actually, since it's been speculated (primarily by Oudies, I believe?) that it's possible that the reason leakage stops is that the spike has "bonded" to a new spirit; this put forward as a possible reason why Vin's spike does anything worthwhile after being out of her body so often.

I feel like I should have seen some variant on "Tan was a kandra the whole time" before, but I can't recall it, and the idea of him being a rogue kandra does allow a pretty easy explanation for any resurrection. The Blessings would also make him susceptible to influence by non-Harmony forces (if there are any of note) looking to drive someone insane.

At first I feel like you might have a point there, then I recall that it's viable to talk about the length of Bleach's run in terms of decades...

Peter going oldschool with his trolling.

We did not. Not surprising, but it is new information.

Oh dear. Oh well obviously that's just Ruin being all Ruinous... but wait....

So that answers the question on the storing-sickness thread. It looks like Feruchemical gold will first wipe out the symptoms, but then takes some more juice to get at the underlying pathogen.

Let's see if I'm setting a bad example... EDIT: Not anymore.

Good catch, thanks. Sorry for not recalling that myself. :/