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Quantus

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Everything posted by Quantus

  1. Ill be honest, I'd previously thought Chull was a non-specific term (like beast, varmint, or...Chicken) for any of the various domesticated crustaceans. To the OP of Things Id Like to See in Rhythms of War, I have a bunch, and Im hoping that Book 4 is going to reveal a whole bunch of these lingering RAFO questions to set the stage for the Book 5's big First Half conclusion: Another Bondsmith Division Cohesion Tension Rlain POV New/Living(?) Shardplate More Fused Surges More Voidbinding Surges Hoid's Spren A Vasher/Nightblood Reunion A (confirmed) Dawnshard
  2. So it's Desirable but not Acceptable? Im confused because it sounds like your Emphatically no is a lot like an Emphatic Yes. We shall see, I suppose. I disagree on just about every point, but that's just my own personal perspective. At the end of the day these are precisely the sort of philosophic differences that the Orders and their divergent idea and Ideals of honor are supposed to examine.
  3. Sure, but my point was you were trying to speculate on the Windrunner's 4th based on a lens of "Pure Justice", which is very much not the perspective of the Windrunners, though it is the perspective of the Skybreakers, which I think is why your conclusion came down to a statement of Acceptable Losses and what kaladin would likely view as a rationalization of who it's OK to kill, which I do not see as jiving with what we've seen of the Windrunner path. So yes, they are both (arguably they are all) asking the same questions, but I dont think we are going to guess what the Windrunners are going to do based on Skybreaker philosophy. Syl even warns Kaladin about getting too obsessed with "finding [his] own Justice".
  4. Wouldnt be the first example. You wouldnt think the fact that shards are dead spren wouldnt be the sort of thing people forget, either. Or that those weird platforms are giant teleportation fabrials.
  5. The little girl has long been a point of debate. I dont know that it's been settled with a WOB but top theory is that he granted her a breath and the rest was him guidig her own intent on how it affected her. But it's a good point, that is an outlier of Awakening behavior that we dont fully understand. It's still very much limited by touch and line-of-sight, though, we have absolutely never seen any form of awakening operate at the distances you propose.
  6. Im not saying it would need a physical object, it would need a spiritual Connection. A loaded Connection Metalmind might work I suppose and be a physical object, or there might be an Aon to do it directly that might then be part of a physical object-type Aon device, but if you are imagining hair&blood, that's not what I meant. Meanwhile, Awakening has no direct external targeting of that kind at all, so Im not sure what you were referring to when you mentioned it. The closest Awakening has gotten is when Vasher included a fingernail or something to make an awakening cheaper.
  7. Ok, then I have no idea why you are asserting what you are asserting. Could you elaborate on your opinion?
  8. Small peanuts in the face of all the other crap they've forgotten, to my mind. They've forgotten just about everything and gone through several political and religious Dark Ages where a ton of knowledge was being actively hidden.
  9. Sorry, bad comparison, I was thinking in terms of Dresden Thaumaturgy terminology. I dont mean a literal Voodoo doll, just that the Kill Aon would likely require some Connection to the target to be able to target it from a distance, as opposed to a purely cognitive Name of the person.
  10. You'd probably need to include something to provide a Connection to the target, voodoo-doll style.
  11. I may just be cynical, but it doesnt surprise me much. Of all the people that might personally notice, it's still a relatively small cross-section (priest-slaves and rich ladies) that would actually be heeded enough for the fact to make it's way into common knowledge, assuming it wasnt kept under wraps as a state secret. That probably wouldnt stop an evil enough empire with a crazy immortal in charge from having secret parshmen breeding programs to harvest them like cattle (or something equally horrible). But the history of Rsharan academics is much more about what they've forgotten than what they've managed to discover
  12. I wouldnt call it two modes, at least not the same way Gravitation is split into distinct Lashings. I think it is more that Soulcasting is kind of like a mix of AonDor and Awakening in that it has a whole lot of Default Variables for what it can do, like AonDor it can be modified and like Awakening that modification can be simply through a specific Intent at the time of casting, which can be as simple or as complex as the casting is capable of. So at it's most basic Soulcasting would transform one basic Essence into another of equal Mass, but it can be modified to do all kinds of more specific things if the caster Knows enough. That being said, I also suspect that a Soulcasting which increases the total mass of the target is going to require more Stormlight to achieve the transformation than otherwise needed, on the logic that the Cosmere still operates on physics generally (realmics notwithstanding) and Investiture is typically the mechanism to balance the equations.
  13. Per WOB the gemhearts are tiny, pale while like bone, and embedded in their sternum. All that adds up to them being really easy to miss unless they are already chopping up and examining their bodies. Since they dont seem much into forensic autopsies or cannibalism of their slave-race or anything, they wouldnt have much reason (by Alethi standards) to take a close look at the bodies and figure it out. And in the case of the singers they were always too preoccupied with the next Greatshell hunt and the next Highstorm, so they barely stuck around long enough to deal with their own dead bodies, nobody left to go poking at the enemy. On a historic note, if Im not mistaken even the actual parshmen were known to react badly if anyone messed with their dead. As one of the very few actual opinions they were known to ever express, I think it was said that the Rosharans just decided over the years that it wasnt worth provoking them. Disclaimer on that last bit, I know Rlain and the other dull-form inflitrators had that reaction, and I think it was mentioned as a known reaction from parshmen in general, but I cant say for certain if we've seen a true slave-form react to it.
  14. That sounds a lot like skybreaker logic, and by that alone I dont really expect it to match the Windrunners Ideals. Those two orders were far more directly opposed, by all indications in the Gem Records.
  15. From a certain perspective that is exactly what Radiant's are becoming with their Ideals. It's just a more equal merger rather than one being a parts-car for the other.
  16. Awesome, thanks! That sounds to me like they do Drop when the shardblade is summoned but they exist as a Deadeye somewhere in shadesmar when not manifested, do you read it the same way. To the OP: I tend to think it's a combination of various groups hoarding them in secret, with a lesser contribution being buried under layers of crem on forgotten battlefields. The Singers had some, which would not have been included in Dalinar's accounting. The Shin almost certainly have some, as did the Sons of Honor and the Ghostbloods. The Diagram probably does as well. And there would undoubtedly be some that have spent their histories on the black market and/or in criminal hands rather than royal hands.
  17. Good point, as far as I know we dont know anything specific so we dont know what if anything it took to make it work. We dont even know if Vasher is the only Nalthian we've seen that would need to try, so Im not sure what data can be used. We do know that using Stormlight for Awakening would require a different Hack, since Vasher has figured out one but not the other.
  18. IN this isntace I suspect the bigger difference is that spren are, fundamentally, not native to the Physical Realm, so all those bits of the Spiritweb that normally dictate what your physical form would look like are going to be missing or wildly different. How different it needs to be to matter? No clue
  19. Now that is specifically regarding spiking, so could have no connection, but I feel what is causing the issue, is with how heavily invested the spren is. Just like when people say can a mistborn become a radiant, Brandon says yes, but that there is already investiture in those cracks, so it is going to be harder. So I read that portion as the same with breaths. Trying to give breath to a spren, regardless whether on the physical or the cognitive, would run into the same problems. There is another WoB on awakening that mentions how the more damaged a lifeless is, the more breath is required to give it that sense of being "as it was", leading up to if it was just a skeleton, you might as well just awaken cloth and wood (his words). So you may need the godking's hoard of breaths to do what you are positing. I just think a bondsmith can dodge that issue because they can manipulate connection, and investiture directly (it appears to me at least). I could see that interpretation, though I could also see that as an issue with Spiking and/or with Hemaurgy specifically, similar to how Spiking Hoid would supposedly cause unforseen oddities even though he's compatible with most of the other magic systems. But that becomes another unknown: if the spiritweb is too different from a standard human's to be able to reliably spike an ability into it but not too different to be unable to spike their side of the Nahel Bond away, is there a similar line where the Spiritweb is too different from human for this whole "counterfeit Soul" thing to matter?
  20. It's definitely possible to use, but significantly more limited than some are describing (here and elsewhere), and there are going to be limits. Basically you could pull off anything you could yourself do entirely in your head, without benefit of writing anything down for notes or calculations. Well, that changes the landscape, i was definitely stuck in the bullet-time speed of thought side, but if it also includes Intuitive Leaps, that's does open up a lot of additional capability. Thanks! That leads me to several other questions: How long can you burn Zinc before you would need to also tap/Compound F-Bronze to restore your mind? If Zinc burns calories at an increased rate, it would follow that your brain would also need rest at the same increased rate. What are the limits of these Intuitive Leaps? Is it still limited by your own knowledge and just represent a sort of sub-consciou data-based statistical analysis (Im thinking Dune Mentats, here) or is there a Fortune/Spiritual Realm mechanic going on here where you are actually peaking into the Cosmic Truth of the Spiritual realm the way Atium works.
  21. Interesting! Im not sure if that helps or hurts my point, but it's something I didnt know. One interpretation would be that a dismissed deadeye blade goes back to shadesmar as an eyeless, located wherever their families keep them, and they Drop like a Mandra when summoned. The other possibility is that they exist as both at the same time (a manifest spren in the Physical Realm and simultaneously as a deadeye somewhere in a non-correlating location in Shadesmar. PS. Did you mean to add a link?
  22. That's fair, and I didnt mean challenge your Moelach point. I was originally under the same impression that you were, that Rock was typical in hsi ability, and was surprised relatively recently when I learn otherwise.
  23. Im of two minds about that part. On the one hand, I figure it would take a hack precisely as much as it takes a hack to use Stormlight for Awakening, which is to say for some reason Stormlight will feed a Divine Breath without hacking but needs a hack to use it for actual Awakening. In reaching for an comparison, I think that could mean that a Radiant would be able to inhale the Mist and get the general benefits (self-healing, no need to breathe, increased physical traits, etc) but perhaps they could not use it for actual Surges? On the other hand, if a radiant can power surges with the Investiture present in a Perpendicularity, is the shardpool liquid really that much different than the mist? Both are condensed Investiture that exists in the Physical Realm rather than requiring a conduit Connection to Preservation as with the Compounding Hack.
  24. That's fair. I took the bit about maintaining full power away from Elantris to be an equivalent circumstance, but it's true that it could be referring to the Homeland restriction on their magics rather than the Dor's own issue when away from Sel. My understanding of Connection is that it typically operates in the Spiritual Realm, and if that is true I think it would bypass the distance issue entirely.
  25. There's a new WOB that I think is relevant. This is confirmation that storing Connection to Elantris (via a medallion) would allow an elantrian to access the Dor off-world. Given that, I suspect a similar route would allow a Cognitive shadow, spren, etc, to be able to leave the planet. It's not hte same circumstance, but I think the problems rest on similar underlying principles.
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