Harrycrapper

I think the star in the Detritus system has a different description than our sun. While it's possible the moon could have been terraformed to the point that it has an atmosphere and can support life, I don't think humans in the Cytoverse were advanced enough to alter the sun in a significant enough way. 

On 11/15/2021 at 5:53 PM, HSuperLee said:

Ten-thousand is a lot, to say the least. And the best option I can think of is absurdly risky, and not easy to pull off without time and resource for experimentation. But, it is theoretically possible that you could form a hemalurgic spike (getting the metal might be difficult, but if you can contact world hoppers it might be possible) and then sneak into the court of the gods and steal the divine breath from one of the Returned. Once you have that, the biggest thing you want to do is lay low for a bit until the panic of a god being murdered calms down. But once it does, you use your divine breath to impersonate a Returned and enter the court of the gods as a foreign Returned looking for sanctuary and breath for sustenance. You now have a salary of one breath a week that you will not consume, not being a cognitive shadow but only a fake Returned, which you can use to build up a stash over time. It doesn't get you all 10,000 very fast, but it at least ensures a regular income of new breaths.

 

Relevant WoB:

Edit: I just saw you made another post where you suggest exactly this. Disregard my post in that case.

This actually won't work. Hemalurgy doesn't steal the exact amount of Investiture that the person being spiked carries. So, a Hemalurgically stolen Divine Breath won't give someone the 5th Heightening and would also likely appear off to other people with aura recognition. However, if you get real good at killing Returned, you could just keep spiking the Divine Breaths out of them and sell the spikes for large quantities of ordinary Breaths. This is all assuming Endowment doesn't take issue with someone killing the people she specifically chooses to Return. 

19 minutes ago, Halyo_Alex said:

That's what Nightblood is for.

But to actually give my two cents on this whole discussion; I'd say it's reasonable to believe that 1. Endowment would be aware that our would-be hemalurgist is coming, given her aptitude for future sight, and 2. that she would probably disapprove of one of her special-made Returned getting killed off against their will and their Investiture harvested for selfish desires. So it seems probable that unless she makes a plan that works around a Returned getting spiked (which, yknow, is not impossible), you'd be smote pretty fast if you tried to do this.

Of course, I think it gets MUCH more interesting from a narrative perspective if she DID formulate a plan that's based on a Divine Breath becoming contained in a hemalurgic spike. What in the Cosmere could she want something like that for, in that case?

Yea that's basically my perspective as well, this would need to be Endowment sanctioned. 

1 hour ago, Inquisitor #5 said:

I'm also unsure what exactly allows Endowment to smite someone, she presumably can't just reach out and kill anyone in the cosmere, though I can definitely see having a lot of her Investiture being something that'd let her smite you. If one subscribes to the idea that Nalthian humans were directly created by Endowment, it might be that one must be Nalthian, or that she could only take away her Investiture from an existing system. Though that seems to go against her Intent.

I always figured it was because she's completely unopposed. Odium couldn't do that to just anyone because Cultivation could counter it much like Ruin was countering Vin's moves as Preservation. Harmony can't do it because of the nature of holding the two Shards he has makes it difficult to do much. But, Endowment is the sole Shard on Nalthis which I figure gives her more leeway in terms of what she can do, but obviously just on her planet, I don't think she can strike from afar. 

3 hours ago, StanLemon said:

This is more or less how Brandon described it too

Expanding on that, it's similar to how AonDor works. The Elantrian makes an Aon shaped in a particular way and the Investiture is pushed out of the Cognitive realm through that shape and produces an effect based on various specific aspects of the shape(size, modifiers, ect.). In Allomancy, the metal is the Aon, the act of burning it is equivalent to the Elantrian drawing the Aon, and the Investiture comes from the Spiritual realm instead because it didn't get stuffed into the Cognitive realm like it did on Sel. 

2 hours ago, Inquisitor #5 said:

Edit: also, the Court of Gods is the likeliest place to find a Returned to spike, so you'd need to get in there just to make the spike. After that everyone'd probably be on high alert because a Returned has either died (if you left the body) or gone missing (if you disposed of the body) and that's the situation you'd be entering the Court of Gods in.

I'd say the best way to do this would be to post a Kandra in somewhere like Idris where they don't revere the Returned and just let them die when their week is up. The Kandra just needs to find the person and spike them. They won't be well guarded and the killer wouldn't be pursued like they would if they killed a Returned in Hallandren. Unfortunately, you'd still probably be going up against Endowment. Between Shardic futuresight(which she seems to be talented at compared to others like Honor), the straight up ability to smite you, and the fact that there's some sort of customs officials you have to get through on your way out of Nalthis, I'm not sure anyone is pulling this off that Endowment doesn't want to. 

Hmmm, offhand I'm not sure you could get enough Stormlight out of one person to grant Heightenings. Maybe if you created multiple spikes from separate Radiants who are filled to the brim. You'd need to have that special table used in Hemalurgy to make sure the spike goes into the host as quickly as possible, I imagine Stormlight would leak out of a Hemalurgic spike faster than most things. Also, a spren or Herald might have enough Investiture for that to be possible with one spike.

59 minutes ago, KnightsOfHonor said:

How did he think things would go? Show up, take out not one, but two shards, and then walk away unscathed? He is the god of hatred, not arrogance. 

It worked on Sel...

1 hour ago, Pagerunner said:

I don't recall Brandon saying that everyone ought to be able to burn atium. I know it's been RAFO'd, and I could find Brandon saying "not just anybody could use it." On the topic of hindsight, I've seen him talk about atium breaking rules, and I know fans have discussed the rules it breaks (including who can use it, and also why it can be affected by steelpushes), but I can't find Brandon himself commenting on it. Did I miss something? Or was the questioner mistaken?

Brandon was writing a screenplay for Mistborn and in the screenplay he made adjustments to the story. One notable thing I remember was Shan Elariel being Ellend's sister instead of an Elariel. The other one was that he wanted to make it so anyone could use Atium because it made more sense, I think someone linked the WoB up there that explains some of it.

1 hour ago, Pagerunner said:

Peter's answer seems to assume the questioner is correct. Now, I'll be honest, I've proposed that framework over the years (among many others), especially since "refined atium" was revealed on the hemalurgy table. But does this confirm it's an actual, canon fact? Or is this an instance of Peter as a fan, speculating off the cuff, assuming that Brandon said what people actually say he said? (For what it's worth, my proposal was that pure atium could do what any of its alloys could do, but everybody only knew the one effect, so that's what kept happening; actual atium Mistings, but they only had the Intent to use atium to accomplish the atium-electrum effect.)

I theorized along these same lines a while back. I've always thought that the Atium from Era 1 was an alloy and not the pure form based on how Malatium works. Gold lets you see your past self, Malatium lets you see someone else's. Electrum lets you see your immediate future, Atium lets you see other people's or objects' future. It just seems odd to me that Atium works in a reverse manner to electrum much like other metal and alloy pairs work, much like gold and Malatium work. 

1 hour ago, Pagerunner said:

 

1. "That answer has already been revealed canonically. RAFO." So... there are a couple ways I could take this.
   1. The allomancy poster says "pure atium grants the Allomancer an expansive vision of the future and enhances the mind's ability to accept, process, and hold information. In alloy form, it produces various mental and temporal effects." This could be read in two ways:
      1. The effects we see in the books do, technically, satisfy the letter of the description. In this case, it would mean that pure atium does what we see this "impure" atium do, allomantically.
      2. It's possible that the "expansive vision" and "mental enhancements" from pure atium are bigger in scale and degree than what we saw from atium burners in the book. We've been reading it like 3.1.1 the whole time, but that's been a misinterpretation.
   2. The hemalurgy table says atium "Steals any power. Must be refined." So, technically, we do know what pure atium does. But we only know what it does hemalurgically, not allomantically or feruchemically, which does technically answer the questioner's followup of "what does pure atium do."
   3. Peter says "RAFO" instead of explaining it. Is it possible that this gets touched on in The Lost Metal? But that wouldn't be "revealed canonically" yet, in my mind, since the book's not published yet. He may have just been saying RAFO since the topic's OP (who was not the questioner in the comments) is partway through reading Bands of Mourning... but we don't learn anything new about atium after that or in Secret History (the Hemalurgy table is in the Hero of Ages leatherbound), so I'm not sure what he'd be avoiding.

 

If Peter isn't mistaken here, my thought is that the ancient Terris prophecies were made using Atium. The Terris prophecies are the only instance on Scadrial that we know of where someone who is not a Shard saw further than a few seconds in the future besides Elend at the end of HoA. I don't believe Feruchemy has any properties that would allow someone to do that. They didn't have strong enough Allomancy back then to do what Elend did with duralumin + Atium. But, maybe they were able to use some sort of pure form of Atium to connect to the Spiritual Realm like Elend did and see the future where Sazed saves humanity or were able to just straight up see the future through some other utilization of Atium. Another possibility is that Ruin's Perpendicularity is the pure Atium and they were able to use that much like Rashek and Vin used Preservation's. Except, Ruin's power could be used to see into the future.

4 hours ago, Quantus said:

I am entirely convinced that Bondsmith Plate will be made of Gloryspren, on the basis of how they were congregating in huge numbers around Dalinar in very much the same way the Windspren were congregating around Kaladin from OB onward. 

I'm going to back this up with Elhokar's comment from early in TWoK where he said that he only seems to see Gloryspren around Dalinar. 

2 hours ago, Mage said:

Counter question: What do spren shardblades look like, when summoned in the physical realm and a lightweaver/elsecaller/willshaper is looking into shadesmar?

It's possible they don't look like anything when summoned. If a human transitions to the Cognitive Realm, they don't seem to exist in the Physical Realm or at least they don't leave any visible remnant. Similarly, I would think if a spren is summoned into the Physical Realm as a Shardblade, they shouldn't be visible in the Cognitive Realm at all. It's been a bit since I read OB, but I think someone in Shadesmar said that when the deadeye blades are summoned, they disappear from the Cognitive Realm. 

1 hour ago, Quantus said:

It's still funny to me that he was supposed to deliver a sequel Shadows of Self and he showed up with "twins", having also written Bands of Mourning as a "warm-up" to "get back into the world."

It wasn't only SoS and BoM too, he also showed up with a secret pregnancy aka Secret History. 

2 hours ago, Use the Falchion said:

Ah I forgot about it! Thanks for the reminder!

Honestly, probably alongside or right above Starsight. The story is cool and there's a fair bit of fun worldbuilding, but its impact on me was minimal. I don't hate it, and my reread of it last month was really fun, but I'm just not attached to it in the way I am these other stories in the Cytoverse. In fact, it should probably go below Starsight because of that...but I'm not sure I can justify that either.*

(Of Sanderson's short stories that I've read, I still like Firstborn the best.)

 

*I don't hate Starsight, I actually liked rereading the book better as a whole than I did Skyward, weirdly enough. But it's just not my favorite Sanderson book. 

Yea that mostly tracks with how I feel. Starsight is...odd. I do decently like it, but it was a bold choice of Brandon to separate Spensa from all the characters from Skyward. It almost didn't work for me because of that. But, for some reason I mostly base my feelings on Sanderson books on the endings and Starsight did end quite well. That's also the reason I like Defending Elysium, I thought the ending was really interesting. And that's also why I would rate Sunreach as the lowest, I think it had the weakest ending. Though I think that is because it was the first one Janci worked on and she was still trying to get a feel for it all. However, I do think the Rig/FM romance worked a lot better than what seems to have been set up for Allanik and Arturo. It just seems a bit gratuitous to develop another romance between two characters, though I guess these are supposed to be YA stories. 

22 hours ago, Use the Falchion said:

Just finished! I liked Sunreach, but I LOVED ReDawn. From the worldbuilding to the slick teleporting action sequences to the escalation of the Superiority to the hints at romance to the gut punch of an ending...yeah, this was the best novella of the bunch yet. I think it also fixes some of the complaints with FM's personality from Sunreach as well. Now for the all important question:

  Hide contents

We have FM and Rig getting together in Sunreach. Arturo previous relationship died offscreen so that this one could live - who is going to be paired up in the next novella? 

 

Overall, I think I'd currently rate the Cytoverse:

Skyward

ReDawn

Sunreach

Starsight

Out of curiosity, where would you put Defending Elysium in there?

7 hours ago, Oversleep said:

You still haven't sourced it up.

Medallions require that someone with the respective power contribute towards making the medallion. We're still missing some key information on how those are created, but Allik specifically said that Kelsier only gave them F-Warmth and they reverse engineered the rest on their own over the years. After Wax asks why they don't just wear multiple medallions, Allik says that won't work, they interfere with each other. Allik then says to make a medallion with multiple powers, you'd need to have them instead of just adding yours and passing it to the next person to add theirs. We may not know what the excisors are or what they do, but we know it takes a live Feruchemist to make a medallion. They have Feruchemy. I don't have a digital copy of BoM, if you need confirmation of this, read chapter 21, specifically the portion where Wax questions Allik. 

8 hours ago, Oversleep said:

All people on Scadrial have seeds of Metallic Arts in them; however, without additional factors they don't emerge. Just like introducing lerasium to bloodlines to create nobles (without that you need mistsnappings that specifically add Investiture, otherwise Mistings are extremely rare) or whatever happened to Terris so they have Feruchemy.

https://wob.coppermind.net/events/243-hero-of-ages-qa-time-wasters-guide/#e6148

The Terris were given Feruchemy as a gift from Preservation and/or Ruin:

Quote

teknopathetic

I have a Reddit PM WOB that says the Terris were given Feruchemy as a gift, and that Brandon may get into how that occurred at some point.

Brandon Sanderson

It was more of a gift than an accident, but I do plan to someday dig into it more.

General Reddit 2018 (April 30, 2018)

So unless Kelsier somehow figured out how to give people Feruchemy that can be passed down to their descendants like it does for Terris people, they're descended from Terris people. The only other established ways of obtaining Feruchemy outside of genetically inheriting it are Hemalurgy and Medallions. Medallions can't be made using other Medallions and Hemalurgy still requires that you take the power from a Feruchemist. 

Now, you can propose that Kelsier took a bunch of Terris people with the right SDNA to pass it on to children and they sowed their wild oats across Southern Scadrial, but I'm more inclined to believe that Rashek included some Terris people when he sectioned off the Southern Scadrians as a control group for his genetic experiment. 

10 hours ago, Oversleep said:

Exactly. He specifically genocided his own people twice because he was afraid of Feruchemy. First by turning all Feruchemists alive into mistwraiths, then when he realized there are dormant genes for it in the surviving rest of population he created breeding programs for them to get rid of Feruchemy.

Rashek was afraid of another Fullborn. Southern Scadrial does not have the ability to produce Mistborn, and can barely produce any Mistings due to the lack of Lerasium in their genetic heritage. Also, there's a boiling ocean separating the two continents that I don't think even a Fullborn could make it through. I don't think this would have been a factor. 

10 hours ago, Oversleep said:

We know that Kelsier brought them technology to use Metallic Arts. As of right now we have no knowledge of South having had Feruchemists.

I will concede that it is possible for them to not have Terris ancestry. Maybe Kelsier figured out where a bit of Lerasium was and somehow used it in conjunction with some of Marsh's Atium to make some Ferrings(they don't have Full Feruchemists, otherwise they would have been able to make Medallions with more powers). However, without a doubt they do have Feruchemy, nothing about the Medallions makes sense if they don't have live Feruchemists. 

3 hours ago, Bearer of Agonies said:

Well, most dead Shardblades are lost, considering there should have been hundreds or thousands of Radiants, but only around 80-100 Shardblades are known in the present day. There were more Radiants in the Feverstone Keep vision then there are Shardblades in the modern day, so it's assumed that most shardblades are lost or hoarded by some group or another (the Skybreakers, the Shin, etc.)

The Skybreakers definitely have some, they gave Helaran a set that no one had ever seen or heard of. 

On 10/13/2021 at 9:09 AM, Sir Anthony said:

I don't buy the Terris architecture argument. Whatever Terris architecture survived the Lord Ruler's reign long enough for Kelsier to see it, Wax would have been at least as familiar with it as Kelsier. If anything survived, the surviving Terris would have undoubtedly incorporated it into their buildings in their New Terris city-within-a-city where Wax spent part of his childhood. And for Rashek's hut: it may have been stone, but I don't think it was long and narrow. But that's moot, because Wax also saw Rashek's hut while he was in the Kandra homeland.

The Terris architecture bit was just my first thought when I read it, Kingsdaughter provided a WoB where Brandon clarifies that it was the Ska huts from the prologue of the first Mistborn book. But, I stand by the fact that at least some Southern Scadrians are descended from Terris people as that's the only way they should have access to Feruchemy. 

20 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Even if they share lineage

They have Feruchemy, so that's not an if. They do share common ancestry.

This is all mostly moot as Kingsdaughter cleared things up, however I typed it all up before that.

22 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

I highly doubt that 1036 years after Rashek separated North and South with boiling oceans they still have similar architecture. 

Architectural influences last thousands of years. Yes, a lot of things change over the years, but a lot of stuff sticks around too. Sometimes it's blatantly trying to emulate a culture's architecture from the past like a lot of the capitol buildings in Washington DC, other times subtle influences survive the millennia. It's as possible for Terris influences on something like this to survive that length of time as it for every shred of it to be forgotten because of calamity. You can doubt all you want, but it's possible and we have no facts pointing in either direction. 

 Also worth noting is that southern Scadrial is probably the only place you could find hints of ancient Terris architecture(aside from Rashek's hut obviously) as Rashek basically destroyed nearly every bit of culture of the Terris people in northern Scadrial. 

31 minutes ago, Oversleep said:

Like, even if they were both descended from the same culture (which they are not, unless you have a source stating otherwise)

So Rashek who was, for lack of a better term, a Terris supremacist, altered the DNA of humanity to help them survive the deathworld he created and left a bunch of humans at the south pole with unmodified DNA in case he screwed up, didn't include a single member of his people? And those same people somehow have access to the magic system that only people descended from Terris have? 

Also, I'd like to address "which they are not, unless you have a source stating otherwise." I just kind of find it ironic you said that absent a source corroborating your position or even any reasoning. I get that you don't think southern Scadrians don't have any Terris blood or any Terris influences, but you stated that as if it were a fact and then required I provided sources to the contrary. Which, I also get why you didn't provide any sources as there aren't any. There are no WoBs on this specifically that I can find. So given the facts we know(i.e. Southern Scadrians have Feruchemy and Feruchemy is hereditary) they have Terris ancestry. It's likely not a whole lot of Terris ancestry, but it's enough to make an entire medallion economy. 

18 hours ago, Sir Anthony said:

Here's more context on the long, narrow bunkers the sovereign remembered. Seems an odd detail for Sanderson to randomly include. And I don't think Sanderson would describe a https://coppermind.net/wiki/Stormshelter by accident and then highlight it for no reason. 

When I read it, I thought that it was referring to ancient Terris architecture, specifically Rashek's hut in Credig Shaw which had personal significance to Kelsier. The Southerners have ties to the ancient Terris people as they have Ferrings among them which is how they create the warmth medallions. So, it stands to reason they might have some architecture that resembles ancient Terris buildings as well. I don't think we'll know for certain why the architecture was familar to the person who put the memory in the coin without asking Brandon, assuming it doesn't somehow get answered in TLM. 

Though, there's another possibility that just occurred to me. Ostensibly, Hoid would have had to retrieve and replace the memory in the coin before giving it to Wax to make sure it had what he wanted Wax to see. What if the buildings were familiar to Hoid and somehow that got tied to the memory before putting it back in the coin? Given that copperminds that can be shared can now be common, it begs the question of whether someone can change/tamper with other peoples' memories before storing them again. 

2 hours ago, Oversleep said:

"consciousness in the cosmere is directly tied to  Investiture" - Brandon Sanderson https://wob.coppermind.net/events/124-drogakrolowpl-interview/#e1817

Leave Investiture alone long enough and it starts thinking. We see this everywhere.

Yes, Investiture can become sapient on it's own. It can also provide sapience to something that otherwise wouldn't be. But, that doesn't mean the consciousness literally is the Investiture or vice versa. There's a definite relationship between the two, but consciousness isn't Investiture and Investiture isn't consciousness. Investiture is the means by which something can become sapient. A Kandra/Mistwraith's spikes are not their mind, it's the means by which they can use their mind.

On 9/28/2021 at 2:17 PM, Oversleep said:

A kandra is born when a mistwraith receives spikes.

So when they die - does the kandra die or mistwraith?

The Kandra is the mistwraith, they are not separate beings. Mistwraiths are physically altered humans that TLR designed with something specific missing that prevents them from being sapient without spikes. The spikes contains whatever allows them to become people, it doesn't create a new one. So when they die and show up in the Cognitive realm, they'll show up however they see themselves just like any other person. The Koloss didn't see themselves as Koloss, they saw themselves as people. Similarly, Kandra spend so much time imitating people that most in Era 2 would show up as whatever form they identify with the most. I'd say if Tensoon died, he'd show up looking like a dog. The Era 1 Kandra that never left the homeland would likely appear as the translucent forms with whatever material they preferred for a skeleton. 

Yea, Mistwraiths are technically humans with some weird Cognitive blockage and altered physical forms. Era 1 Koloss are humans that are altered by the placement of spikes in specific bind points. I believe it takes 5 humans to make one Koloss, but that's mostly just to make 4 spikes and to combine the skin for the resulting Koloss when you place the spikes in the 5th human. When a Koloss dies, you will see one human Cognitive Shadow in the Cogntive realm, not 5, because the other four died whenever that Koloss was made. 

Although it likely isn't comforting, there are also things that Brandon says he will never reveal, like what happens when someone goes in to The Beyond. It's something I think all authors do because sometimes the question is more compelling than the answer. 

On 9/1/2021 at 3:14 PM, Shinwarrior said:

The Hero will bear the future of the world on his arms. - This feels blatantly like Sazed. He recreated the world with the knowledge he carried. The whole reason Elendel is how it is, is because of the knowledge he bore on his arms. (Now, may this also have been changed by Ruin? Maybe. If so I say the word 'future' is what was changed) 

Though I'm similarly not sure Kelsier would fit various parts of the prophecy, the whole bearing the future of the world on his arms could be in some way referencing his scars. 

Rysn. She seemed really petulant in WoK, stupid in WoR, and too self pitying in OB. But, I like her in Dawnshard and what little we got of her in RoW.