Kurkistan

And I will now steal this to prove the possibility of Cat Inquisitors who don't look like porcupines. Thank you.

By the power of Grayskull! Can you imagine a single, regular looking man with access to all 16 Allomantic abilities in a modern city of millions, intent upon murder? Fading back into the endless crowds, and using copper to hide his every use of allomancy? Using bendalloy bubbles and the entire range of allomantic abilities to defeat any opponent unfortunate enough to get in close? Using steel-pushes and iron-pulls to their full potential? Rioting and soothing civilians into and out of panics to throw off the police? Using the duraluminum-enhanced version of all of the allomantic abilities? I'd be afraid of that guy.

You can easily get far more mechanical energy from iron Feruchemy than the "energy" you lose when you draw upon a large amount of weight. I know that other people have posited thought experiments, such as the "bowling ball flight" example, but the first thought experiment that occurred to me seems fairly intuitive and doesn't rely upon drawing any amount of weight from ironminds: Setup: A scale essentially the size of a seesaw attached to some means of transferring excess energy out of the system. On one end of the scale is an iron Fering. On the other end is a weight which is approximately half as heavy as the unaltered Fering. a) The Fering begins with their side of the scale at its minimum height and the weight's side at its maximum. b.) The Fering then stores all of their weight in an ironmind, causing the weighted end of the scale to descend and the Fering to ascend. c) The Fering then stops storing weight, causing the scale to return to the state it was in at step 'a.' d) Rinse and repeat. Some energy loss due to friction and whatever mechanism we have gaining energy from the system, but you just got a Feruchemy-powered perpetual motion plus machine.

Perhaps industrial applications could create shortages, but not allomancers. I doubt that the entire history of Smokers has burned more copper than is in the wiring and plumbing of a single modern house. I don't think it's too inconceivable that a single steel-framed apartment building today contains more steel (and potential iron) than any number of Coinshots/Lurchers could burn in their lifetimes. Remember that allomancers talk about flakes of metal, while any modern building, ship, or car starts at tons and works it's way up.

*Intervenes very quickly* There was a very in-depth discussion about this on this thread. The conclusion was ultimately the velocity, but not momentum, remained unaffected.

Not really, no. There's a heck of a lot of it, and only a small subset of the population is burning it a small amount of the time.

Ah, I had forgotten about that. Thanks for pointing it our, CrazyRioter. For someone on a fan site dedicated almost exclusively to extrapolating large theories from the minutia of textual evidence, I need to work on my memory. :\

We never saw anyone actually leave a time bubble, but we know that Miles tried to escape Marasi's Cadmium bubble when he realized what was happening (pg 304). For all we know there are still massive side-effects that Miles was simply confident of healing from, but we can at least presume that he knew that he wasn't going to be shoved into a time-wedgie or something.

That sounds fairly plausible.

Ah, yes. Non-naked space-walking without the need to maintain an air supply would be convenient. No, she couldn't sorry. Just before that quote we have Marasi: "It's been documented." They did a live test of it, and didn't notice any space-time ruptures going on.

As to "Gaspers," so many very bad things happen when you expose organic tissue to vacuum that having an air supply isn't going to help much. As to "nothing," it's actually Marasi who says it, contextualized by "They cancel one another out. Nothing happens." (pg 202). Sorry.

I experienced my own stupidity when the sample chapters came out and someone in the comments pointed it out. Don't worry: You're not alone.

Actually, that's more of an argument for a "terminal weakness" for all spikes and/or for even the smallest residual Hemalurgic charge being enough to carry on conversation. No matter how strong the spike, 23:45 outside of a body every single day for years is going to end up with some pretty weak-sauce power.

My point may still stand. Once again, Copper/Zinc would probably be the least likely to cause damage, per se, and I imagine that the strength of the spike influences the amount of "twisting" which occurs. I'm assuming that Pathian's prayer-earrings are incredibly weak spikes.

I'm not so sure about mundane attributes necessarily causing bad warping. I can't imagine a single weak Copper or Zinc spike (mental/emotional fortitude) making someone into an inhuman monster. I don't think we ever knew what Wax's earring was made of.

I thought it was spelled out that Vin's and the Inquisitor's unusual strength was a direct result of "doubling up" on an Allomantic abilities by "granting" an ability to someone who already has it, not a specialized "enhancement" bind point.

Fair enough.

I can see two alternatives to Ruin just being able to read minds willy-nilly: 1) Ruin didn't actually read Zane's mind at the end, he either interpreted the movement of his lips or just made an accurate guess based on context clues. 2) We know that Zane has to be somewhat mentally unstable, despite Ruin's reassurances, because Ruin was able to get him to spike himself, so Ruin might have the ability to read the minds of the mentally unstable.

I think we should just go with ads. We could still sell T-shirts and whatnot for discretionary funds (for giveaways, events, the need to pay someone actual money to fix egregious problems, etc.) while relying upon ads for day-to-day costs. This way there is a solid stream of revenue coming in and we can still implement cool ideas like a bound Ars Arcananum without worrying about having to sell X-copies just to make ends-meet, or artificially needing to fill a "cool ideas" quota every month.

While I'll withdraw my claims that Preservation absolutely cannot talk to people directly, given the massive textual evidence against me, I will now try to redefine to allow for non-Hemalurgic communication in extreme cases. What if Preservation can only talk to non-spiked individuals when they are "faithful" or acting to preserve, or some other condition is met? It would be similar to Ruin's ability to influence the mentally unstable despite a lack of spikes, a la Vin's mother. This might even rescue the tatters of my read-write exclusivity, since we still need to see a reason why Harmony can read minds easily while Ruin can't. It seems somewhat unbalanced to just say that Preservation is entirely more capable than Ruin as far as communication goes (although, perhaps Preservation is better at communication, but incapable of coercion through spikes. . .).

*Wishes he had the books on hand for the umpteenth time* And this is why I should re-read the original trilogy again. In an attempt to defend myself: wasn't Spook spiked when Kelsier talked to him? Actually, weren't at least a few of the times "Kelsier" talked to Spook possibly Ruin, trying to preserve and guide his newly-spiked asset? I had the firm impression that this was the case, especially given the lengths that Ruin went to in order to get Spook spiked. If it was Kelsier all or part of the time, then it would still blow my "Preservation can't talk" theory up a bit (although I might be able to squeak out of it by saying that Kelsier, as a human, had a bit of Ruin in him as well as Preservation), but possibly still maintain the necessity of spikes for communication. As to Elend and Vin, what was the exact nature of their communication? Did she send warm feelings towards him? Did they have a conversation? Did she just hear Elends thoughts, but not he hers? Was it a bright light in the sky that inspired Elend to fight harder? I honestly can't remember.

I think you misunderstand what I was trying to say, which is entirely my fault. What I mean to say is that the release of compounded power is not simply a byproduct of tapping a metal for Allomancy. It is my opinion, backed up by the rareness of Mile's employing his Auger abilities despite tapping Health continuously, that a Twinborn can choose to access only the Feruchemical energy stored in a metalmind when burning it using Allomancy. I also believe that these two functions are exclusive, and that a Twinborn must choose which power to access, the Allomantic power of the metal or the Compounded Feruchemical power, when he burns a metalmind, although this is somewhat less well-backed by evidence from the books. I see no problem with using Allomantic and Feruchemical abilities simultaneously, only with the necessity/possibility of accessing the Allomantic properties of a metalmind while also utilizing it to Compound Feruchemical power.

One doesn't actually need to Push or Pull on anything while burning Steel/Iron. The act of burning allows Allomancers to see sources of metal in relation to themselves, with a further act of will (and perhaps a larger amount of metal used) actually causing an object to be Pushed or Pulled. A Double Iron Twinborn could thus just burn his iron in the "passive" state while compounding, although all of your points apply when he employs his massive mass, if you'll forgive the pun. Your theory also assumes that the Feruchemical and Allomantic powers of a single sample of metal can/must be burned simultaneously, which is still under some discussion.

Ok, are the three people on this forum who haven't devoured The Alloy of Law by now gone? You sure? Then let's get cooking! People have been voicing a certain amount of befuddlement about Sazed's ability to read minds in Alloy of Law. Previously, the fact that Ruin could only speak to people, not read their thoughts, was a rather crucial plot point in the original trilogy. My theory is that while Ruin is only capable of "writing" into peoples minds, Preservation is similarly only capable of "reading." Therefore, the combination of the two (Harmony) would be fully read-write capable, able to both read peoples minds and speak to them directly. This also fits in nicely with the ongoing dualism between Ruin and Preservation. We have evidence that Hemalurgy was not always simply a tool for evil, backed up by the hemalurgic earrings that Pathians wear in AoL. From the Brandonothology: Assuming that most people didn't worship the sentient embodiment of entropy, this suggests that Preservation also relied upon Hemalurgy in order to communicate with his followers. The nature of that communication is unclear, though. I can easily see a world where Preservation reads the minds of his followers and then alters the physical world in order to impart messages to them, similarly to how Ruin observes the actions and surroundings of spiked individuals in order to give situation-appropriate nasty comments, and create the perception of reading their minds. We've already seen Preservation communicating in round-about ways with the 16% snap-rate for the mists; albeit this could be an exception rather than the rule, since the mist's auto-snap mode was set up as a mechanism meant to operate after Preservation's departure. I would like to note that I'm assuming that it's possible to give a spike a slight hemalurgic charge by killing an animal with it, or perhaps taking a single large spike that killed one person (a terminally ill volunteer, hopefully) and break it into innumerable smaller, very weak spikes. All of this is for the sake of Pathians not being incredibly evil people. From the Brandonothology: EDIT: Sorry for being so late getting around to Editing, here's the proof.

2 is pretty clearly true. Sazed says that he has the same perception whenever he tries to access another Feruchemist's metalmind. I think the point on compounded metals was more that you can only access one aspect of its power at a time. This would explain why Miles wasn't forced to constantly engage gold's Allomantic power in order to compound it's Feruchemical charge. EDIT: And that's why you don't leave a tab open for a few minutes and then reply without refreshing.