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Quantus

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Everything posted by Quantus

  1. Ruin was Crazy by that point and had basically given in to the drives of the Intent, but the Intent itself is natural Entropy and Decay; that itself isn't evil, but a person being constantly pushed toward Destruction and always defaulting to the most destructive drives is most likely going to eventually become something pretty evil. The Shard is not evil, but it sure as hell drove Ati to become something evil, not unlike any number of mental illnesses. Rayse, by all accounts, started out as an cremhole so it was probably a much shorter trip to EvilLand than Ati, and Divine Anger is a at least as unhealthy a Drive to give a person as Destruction. But neither are inherently Evil any more than Devotion, per Brandon synonymous with Love, is innately Good; just ask anyone with a stalker; hell, in DC Comics the universal Incarnation of Love is called The Predator.
  2. Id say that if Felt were a Kandra I would entirely expect him to adapt his features to match one of the Rosharan ethnicities, rather than being this hodge-podge that doesnt quite fit any. Regarding how he might have survived the end of Era1, I see two possibilities: 1) he made it to one of the caverns; since he had been assigned to guard the Lord Ruler's Eastern Storage Cavern during the Siege of Fadrex City he certainly knew were one or more of them were; 2) logically speaking one of the few available ways to have survived besides the cavern would have been to WorldHop away and evidence suggests he has some means to do that.
  3. The Arcanum Link at the top is a fantastic, searchable repository of the WoB's ("Word of Brandon", tidbits he's given us in Interviews, Q&A's etc. It will suck you in, so be careful if you have some place to be. The site's thread search is quirky but useful, though as a general rule if the topic is horrifically old it might be worth making a new one rather than necro-ing the old thread. But in general I dont think anyone is going to bite your head off for asking a question or broaching a topic they've heard before. Worst case Ive seen is people just post a summary list of the similar discussion topics so they dont have to rehash.
  4. Seriously though, I would go looking for the 11th Heightening...
  5. For what it's worth, gamma radiation is extremely directional and not prone to reflecting off much, so the Lightweaver themselves should been fine so long as they dont aim it at themselves. Also, there is an Interesting and Roshar-relevant application of Gamma Radiation: Granted Soulcasting is probably a lot easier, but it's still an interesting alternate possibility. And if anyone where going to be able to grasp the crystalline patterns of a gem sufficiently to change it by physical brute force, I think it would be a Lightweaver.
  6. Oh dear lord, I never considered the existential crisis that would cause for him. To say nothing of what his Spren would think; I wonder if that would be the sort of thing that might violate one of his sworn Ideals?
  7. How does that square with the fact that Awakened soldiers retain the skills of the corpse's previous life? If Im recalling it correctly that fact was a big part of their military viability. To the OP, I agree with the others that it would likely work and result in a storming weird Lifeless arm. The follow-up questions I have are: could somebody else awaken Your arm, or would the fact that it's still physically attached and sharing your blood-flow (a spiritually significant thing per Hemalurgy mechanics) tie it to your spiritweb enough to cause interference like shardplate to surges? And what would happen if your "dead" arm were awakened and then the damage were healed with Regrowth or F-Gold? Would the Breath simply be lost same as a person dying with one, or would it get sucked into the working and do oddball things?
  8. This, mostly. This place is a great community, just participate. None of us arrive with "a depth knowledge of the cosmere", asking the oddball questions and getting theories shot down is how we all gain more. That and actually being willing & able able to travel to these Events where WoB's are born, so you are already ahead of the curve on that one! If you are looking to "give back" in some more tangible way, there are monthly goals for the Coppermind Wiki that you can always help with.
  9. Only time will tell, I suppose. As a general statement I see a very strong pattern of subverted expectations with a lot of characters, especially "villains" in basically every cosmere work, and Nale already seems to be falling into that category having been introduced as the murderous Radiant-hunter in Edgedancer. On the Watsonian side, since Odium has directly expressed to Dalinar that he intends and requires that all the Heralds die, that give Team Unity a very specific reason to keep Nale alive, regardless of Nales choices. Heraldic status or not, he's no harder to hold prisoner than any other Radiant (millennia of experience aside).
  10. Quantus

    Maya

    Current Vasher seems more prudent than that, but Young Vasher, pre-Manywar Vasher surrounded by his friends, high on their own genius and fresh off a successful WorldHop could probably do all kinds of silly things, not to mention what the rest might do. I dont know about "Infiltrating" but I could very much see the Skybreakers themselves taking an interest in a small group of foreigners with strange magic.
  11. Quantus

    Maya

    Especially if the timeline holds that they first arrived sometime after the Recreance, since they'd have had (almost) no chance of running into a bonded Radiant. Though I supposed they could have learned that part second hand from the Shadesmar natives on their way to Roshar.
  12. I disagree, personally, but then I think he's a red herring baddy and is being actively manipulated by Ishar, who makes a better Vader-figure for me than Nale alone. Honestly I like Nale, his self-doubt makes him oddly sympathetic. Nah, he sticks to the Law, and interprets that as best he can, but he's perfectly willing to drop and abandon a path if the Law comes to contradict it like when Lift was pardoned. And while I think it will be extremely difficult to convince him (or any 5th Ideal Skybreaker) with a simple dissenting Legal Brief, I do think he's open/vulnerable to it. A big part of why I think that is because he is clearly starting to Doubt his own judgement and/or interpretation, given how he counseled Szeth to NOT swear a Dedication Ideal to follow Nale personally.
  13. Which is one of the reasons Nale's current logic is entirely flawed and bound to change eventually. But to answer the initial question, still believe you could use his own description of how Authority works to convince him that the "proper" authority has nothing to do with the race of the serf cannon fodder in this war: by his own logic rises through secular rank and then jumps to divine authority above that. So by his own logic Odium should still be the Murderous Invader of the scenario, and the actual Authority on Roshar should go to either Cultivation as the surviving "original" Shard-God of Roshar, or else the Stormfather as Honor/Tanavast's Invested (in several senses of word) Heir.
  14. Fair enough. Im pretty sure I dont have the taxonomy correct at all, to be honest. I was imagining greatshells as a broadly related class, but your WOB got me thinking they might all be the same species with several distinct metamorphic stages. There's also this WOB that previously had me thinking they had not seen the result of a Chamsfiend pupating in a long time. But in retrospect it doesnt actually say that, just that the reduced pupation is going to have ecological implications. Granted by that point I was wondering if this might not go full Orson Scott Card with it and have the life cycle jump realms entirely, meaning that Greatshells and their biological ability to distill the Spiritual realm into gemhearts might actually be a system of incubating/birthing new spren.
  15. That was my thought as well, which is what made me wonder if there was some other process than heat to accomplish a godmetal phase change, some Investiture equivalent to the very Physical thermal energy overload that causes melting. The fact that he chose the word "distill" rather than a phase-change verb like freeze, precipitate, or solidify makes me lean toward the idea that it's a more complicated process. All that would still be contingent on that root assumption that Investitures' physiccal forms cannot be forced liquid without more qualitative differences, ie changing godmetal to shardpool fuild to gaseous form. Separately, if you can theoretically make lerasium from Mist, what might you get if you tried that with Stormlight, which has 2-3 different shards invested but also predates them all?
  16. Are you sure he was referring to the chasmfiends on the plains as the Final form? I know that was the question asked but it sounds like he wiggled sideways a little with the answer. I was more thinking that the final form that we would have seen would be the island-sized Tai-Na, and that chasmfiends being hunted on the plains being the "second and third stages" he said we'd seen more often. I also thought we'd seen the biggest plains chasmfiend breeds trying and failing to finish the pupation cycle during one of those hunts?
  17. Sweet! I hadnt seent that but fully support it. If Larkin pupate into something so much larger, what then are the greatshells trying to pupate into, and how big might they become?
  18. That's another question: Is the whole Royal Locks manifestation going to be the way it happens every time, or is that more of a one-off Mutation with with Vo and his wife, in that if some other Return had children they would manifest some /other/ expression of divine Return abilities as it's default: variable height, mood ring eye color instead of Hair color, that sort of thing. Even if it's all part of the same general package that can apparently be trained for different effects, I could easily see the base, reflexive expression of that lineage being different for lines founded by different Returned. EDIT: Had a thought on this topic recently: Siah Aimian = Returned-born Race? They have similar control over their physical form. The Locks breed true to a single lineage, but then the Siah are racially immortal so their numbers wouldnt have to increase much to maintain the trait for their population.
  19. Something like that Im sure, though he's RAFO'd the question for now. The whole issue with speed bubbles futzing with bullet accuracy had more to do with the narrative dangers of making a something so overpowered (creates railgun-like super acceleration), as opposed to a natural function of the Realmic principles involved. Having them randomly spin bullets sidesteps that, and just having the aluminum bullets pop the bubble would seem to be a similarly functional limitation.
  20. Per that same WOB, Atium was based on Platinum so I suspect it's simply malleable enough to be shaped without flirting with a phase change where the realmic complications would (I think) start coming into play.
  21. There have been several questions around aluminum and speed bubbles floating through recently, and I had a thought I wanted to add to the pile: A recurring WOB states that aluminum that is crossing the edge of a time bubble will disrupt it's formation, causing a backlash. It got me thinking, if that Aluminum were the allomancer's own Invested Metalmind, would that Investiture charge make it more compatible with their other powers than aluminum otherwise would, in the same way a Radiant's own surges can penetrate their own shardplate? For what it's worth the theory should work more because of the natural of metalminds in general rather than the fact that aulminum is the specific one that stores Identity, but the fact that an Aluminum metalmind would be charged with 'pure' Identity probably wouldnt hurt.
  22. If aluminum is breaking/blocking the edge of the bubble it fails to form, so Id assume it would do the same here. We know that you can make a bubble with at least small amounts of aluminum inside it (since Im pretty sure Wayne has carried aluminum around while using his allomancy), but Id suspect that being entirely surrounded by it would disrupt the bubble formation more than simply carrying it in a pocket.
  23. Like @Mestiv said, what sort of games are you in to, both from a genre and a graphics/vintage standpoint? I personally have recently fallen into a Minecraft hole for the first time in a couple years, they've added a lot of cool functionality since I last played and that game is gloriously scalable to just about any hardware. If you've never played the survival genre though, be warned you die a lot in the beginning. Try not to get too frustrated, it's just part of how those games pace themselves. Last year I set up a RaspberryPi emulator for my nieces that had (and Im not exaggerating here) every game made for an Atari, Nintendo, or Sega system prior to the PS/N64 era (Atari in particular was ridiculously prolific in the 80's, and I had to find and delete all these weird swedish porn titles...). But my point is that the ROMs and emulators for those older and mostly defunct games/systems are freely available and will not challenge a laptop, they'd barley challenge the modern electric toothbrush. As a general statement your laptop will probably do fine with 90% of games that are older than it is itself, to at least middle graphic settings. The rest is budget and preference.
  24. I strongly suspect they're like spiders and can simply grow and grow with no upper limit so long as they have a sufficient food supply. Normally that would still leave upper limits involving gravity and oxygen levels, but Roshar already has a spren-based ecosystem in place to mitigate those sorts of things. I think it's safe to assume that a properly fed Larkin could reach at least greatshell sizes.
  25. You know, I think Id rather we hide the title instead, let see if we can guess the movie from the description Plot: An illegal alien weaponizes an aircraft and destroys most of a major city, killing thousands.
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