Kaymyth

Heh! And that would be why you don't make baby bottles out of pewter.

I know that Harmony has lowered the Snap threshold, but he couldn't get rid of it entirely. I think there would be some variance; a lot of kids will Snap the first time they hit a significant physical or emotional trauma. A sizeable percentage would Snap at birth, while a lot of others might Snap when they first fall out of a tree or something. A charmed few would skate by without any serious traumatic event until their teens or even early adulthood, and then, surprise! Oh, you just had an unexpected blow of serious grief/injury/fear? Oops, you're an Allomancer now!

You say that like there's a difference.

There's a WoB that says so decisively. I can't for the life of me point you to it, but I've read it.

You know, watching the two of you go back and forth has been rather fascinating. I feel like I dropped an argument bomb and then fled the scene. This does give me an idea on how to adjust the scene, though sort of off in another direction. Friend #2 is as like as not to just start talking up freaks as being cool, and then question Friend #1's math just to get a rise out of her. You know, I used to think that all that talk about characters having their own voices and going off and doing their own things without your permission was just authorial hyperbole. Then I started writing this thing. It's like I broke through a barrier in my brain and found a gooey delicious center of insanity inside. And it's trying to convince me that if I reach down in there far enough, I'll pull out a prize.

It also may take more than a thin coating of aluminum. Aluminum and its alloys are more fragile than lead or steel; a shell of aluminum might well get stripped or chipped when the bullet is fired, which would defeat the purpose of using it in the first place.

Wait, I thought that aluminum *did* block Coinshots and Lurchers. After all, it blocks Allomantic pulses, then it would also block the blue lines that are an iron or steel burner's Allomantic links to their anchors. Is there something else out there other than the aluminum bullets being solid that makes you say this? Because I would counter with pointing out that the only aluminum bullets we've seen thus far were the ones the Vanishers were using. We know that the guns (and presumably the bullets) were designed and built by a kidnapped gunsmith. Call me crazy, but somehow I doubt that he'd have been feeling magnanimous enough to put effort into designing an aluminum-cased bullet over a simpler solid design for the sake of saving his poor captors some of their hard-stolen resources.

My gosh, I'm inspiring further depths of math geekery! It warms my nerdy little heart. She is; that's been in her backstory for a while now. Her father's an Allomancer himself, and her maternal grandfather is a Ferring. And now you've got me thinking more than I have before about her extended family. Hah! I now have some scaffolding popping up underneath one of my weaker plot joins! Excellent. This whole writing thing is turning out to be an interesting journey. I've generated little fanfic ministories in my head plenty of times but this is the first one I've dared actually try to put into words. I can practically plot out my transformation from "why on earth would anyone want to read this drek?" from "huh this might actually turn out pretty good" to "heck, if I'm gonna go with it, go big; protagonists are supposed to be extraordinary, right?"

You're welcome. I'm pretty sure there is one, but once again, I can't for the life of me remember where to find it. I've read a LOT of WoBs over the last several weeks. I'll probably have to change the scene if I can't nail this down a little more firmly. The statistics route made the most sense, though, given that the talk was coming from a maths genius. It flowed quite nicely. Eva's double steel, and I threw her the curveball of being a late Snapper. I thought it would be more interesting to have her go through having to learn how to handle the Allomancy and Compounding on-screen, as it were. Plus this gave me the opportunity to have her really get her butt kicked fairly early on.

Thanks for that. A lot of my self-consciousness about it stems from a general terror of accidentally inflicting a Mary Sue upon an unsuspecting world. I'm pretty sure that I've managed to purge the worst of those tendencies out of her personality and backstory by now, but still, there's that lurking monster in the shadows waiting to devour my soul. Or just stand there and mock. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. This whole question actually came about by the standard existential crisis one would expect from a young woman who's dealing with having way more power than most people. The way I dealt with the "why me" question in this first draft actually involved a friend of hers taking her through the math and showing her that she really wasn't all that much of a freak. But I figure if I'm going to have that kind of conversation happening in-universe, then I'd better darned well make sure the theories hold water. Better to let folks have a go at poking holes in it now. So, poke those holes! Aaa! Aaaah! I found it! The MAG supplement actually DOES state the 1 in 2500 figure. Good grief. All that math, and I just now go back and see it in black and white. I searched high and low before, and had completely missed it. There's still, of course, the question as to whether that number is actually canon or not. I do know that there's a sidebar in the book where Brandon says that not all of the mechanics will be canon, but I was looking at the 1 in 50 figure to more of a societal/demographic piece than a mechanics piece. I could very well be wrong, but that's how it read to me. The MAG supplement also does flat-out state that the majority of people have at least enough trace Terris ancestry to have some potential at Feruchemy. Again, whether that falls under canonical demographics or speculative mechanics is something that only Brandon or someone who knows his mind could answer. I figure it'll wind up falling one of two ways. He might look at the math sometime later down the line and go, "Whoa, that's way too common! Nope!" Or he might take they Syndrome from "The Incredibles" approach (albeit a slightly gentler version) and say, "Well, common people getting powers is the point. Superpowered people don't get put up on such a high pedestal if a reasonable percentage of people have access to those powers." We do, at least, know that there was enough intermarriage early on to remove full Feruchemists from the Terris pool. There's a WOB that states that it was the introduction of Allomantic genes into the Terris bloodlines that caused the split into Ferrings in the first place. So we know that it did happen, just not the details of the full extent. But if it worked one way, then it's reasonable to expect that at least some ebbed out the other. I think that "common types" has a lot more to do with which Mistings have an easier time of keeping their powers under wraps. It's kind of hard to use one's Coinshot abilities without other people noticing them. A Seeker or an Augur is going to be a lot less obvious when using one's powers. I probably overestimated the amount that it would factor in. But people being people, I'm sure that there *are* plenty out there mercenary enough to consider it a factor. People are weird. Or I've just been watching too many public television nature shows lately. Now I have a mental image in my head of Wayne doing a nature show narrator impression. Ow, my brain. Wiping out the genetic differences is from a WOB that I read sometime recently. I can't remember for the life of me exactly where it is, as I've been all over the site for several weeks now. But I know that it's out there. And I also remember that generally, if a skaa developed Allomancy on their own, they were almost always the product of a noble's dalliances. The skaa were pretty much locked out of Allomancy without that sort of bloodline sneaking in, which was why the mists Snapping them was such a surprise at first. And I will admit, it's been a couple of years since I read the original trilogy. I'm wanting to re-read them again, but I'm not allowing myself until I've finished the first draft of my story. I'm using that as a sort of carrot reward to motivate myself now that NaNoWriMo is over.

We do know that the mists were Snapping people to make a point. The people Snapped were mostly skaa, who didn't have much predisposition to Allomancy, so I don't think it's entirely out of the question that the mists deliberately boosted their Preservation shares enough to hit the power threshold for Allomancy. It wasn't going for 'Snap all of the people who can be Snapped' it was 'Snap exactly this proportion of people so someone will notice!' That is a good point about folks wanting to have more Twinborn kids. By the same token, though, at the time of Origin the folks left with powers of both kinds would have suddenly been very desirable as mates, possibly leading to an early Metallic Arts population explosion. We also know that Harmony wiped out the genetic differences between skaa and nobles, and this might have affected some of the Allomantic genetic markers as well. I think the mistsickness 16% and the actual natural distribution of Allomancy are completely independent of each other. Since we know that Allomancy is genetic, such a desirable trait would tend to be passed on a lot, especially with no authority-enforced rules of who can marry whom. The old 1 in 10,000 occurrence was a combination of Allomancy being mostly limited to the noble caste and the high Snapping threshold. Since Harmony lowered that threshold as much as he could and there are no longer caste breeding restrictions, that would make for a much higher natural occurrence of Allomancy in the general population.

So, I've been working on a story featuring a main character who is a Compounder, and I found myself at one point experiencing a wee bit of self-consciousness over the whole thing. I, like many others (as I've seen from perusing some old topics), was running on the assumption that Compounding Twinborn would be super-duper rare. I mean, really, there are only 16 types of Compounders out of 256 different types of Twinborn. How many could there be alive at one time? I've seen people comment that it seems odd that there would be individual names for every single different type of Twinborn; would there even be one of each type alive at the same time? So I decided to gather some data and do some math. Hoo boy. Well, to begin with, that 16 out of 256 reduces down to 1 out of 16. (I am assuming that the different combinations of Twinborn are relatively evenly represented.) So, if a person on Scadrial were to meet 16 Twinborn in their lives, chances are that one of them would be a Compounder. Granted, 6.25% of Twinborn = Compounders is a pretty small percentage, but it's hardly infinitesimal. So really, the question of "how much of an arrogant twit am I for giving my main character this level of power?" starts to hinge on how many Twinborn are running around Scadrial. This is where things get interesting. The Alloy of Law MAG supplement has been anointed as canon until Brandon says otherwise. Within its pages, it states that Mistings and Ferrings occur in 1 out of 50 people. It also states these figures independently of each other; i.e. 1 out of 50 people is a Misting, and 1 out of 50 people is a Ferring. I will take what I hope is a reasonable assumption that the 1 out of 50 figure wasn't pulled from some random nether region and is unlikely to be contradicted. The statistical probability of an overlap between Mistings and Ferrings to create a Twinborn then takes 50 x 50 to come up 2500. Thus, on Scadrial, 1 in every 2500 people is a Twinborn. This is assuming an even distribution throughout the population, though, which may very well not be true. The MAG supplement also states that Ferrings skew more common (about 1 in 25) amongst the Terris enclaves, which would make them slightly less common amongst the general population. The Terris populations are smaller than the rest of the Basin at large, though, so it's not going to knock down the general numbers all that much. Still, to be on the conservative side, I'll skew that final figure to 1 in 5000. It's probably making them rarer then they really would be, but 5000 is a nice, easy number to work with. (Incidentally, this would also make AoL-era Twinborn at least twice as common as mere Mistings were during the Mistborn trilogy.) Now, in AoL, at one point Wax states that Elendel has several million people, possibly as many as 5 million. Fantastic! Another easy number to work with. 5 million divided by 5000 = a possible 1000 Twinborn. So, there are 256 different types of Twinborn, that leave us with between 3 and 4 of each type, with a total of 62 or 63 Compounders. And that's just in Elendel. Suddenly it doesn't seem so odd for there to be an individual name for every type of Twinborn after all.

I'm sure that they have some holidays, but the Lord Ruler didn't strike me as the type to allow too much. I'd expect that during his reign, there was some mandatory commemoration of his Ascension that was properly solemn and ceremonial. AoL-era, though, I'm betting that they've been popping up left and right. I'd imagine that every major religion has its own holidays that sprawl all over the calendar. I'm sure there would also be an annual "Origin Day" or something about the Originators coming out of their cavern after Harmony fixed the planet celebrated throughout the Basin and the Roughs.

That's an excellent point. Maybe because it's on the outside of the metal, and not embedded within? Or maybe stomach acid eats through the coating quickly enough that it doesn't come into play? It's a pretty minute amount of oxide. Aluminum's pretty weird stuff, all told. On the periodic table, it's on that borderline between metals and metalloids. There's actually some disagreement in science as to which it really is. That might be why it's so Allomantically weird; it's just metal enough to do something, but its metalloid properties throw everything out of whack.

I have actually been doing a stupid amount of research on this, thanks to the story I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. The modern breakthrough of refining aluminum involved two major processes. The first was the Bayer process, which refines bauxite into aluminum oxide, aka alum or alumina. This piece isn't all that difficult, and may already exist in AoL. It's part two that's the tricky one - the one we call the Hall-Heroult process. Before that was developed, turning aluminum oxide into pure aluminum consumed a lot of other substances that were relatively rare and expensive. In our own history, aluminum was a precious metal, more valuable than silver or gold, until this process was developed. There was even a crown jewel display that had a bar of aluminum in it. The thing about aluminum is that it is so wildly chemically reactive that it forms extremely strong bonds to other elements, making it difficult to refine out. Interestingly, this is also one of the many properties that makes it so useful - pure aluminum in metallic form will quickly form a coating of its oxide which protects it from further corrosion. In other words, it reacts so quickly it builds its own oxide armor. The key piece to Hall-Heroult is electricity, and a lot of it. Instead of using expensive substances to convince the aluminum to decouple from the oxygen, it pours in a huge amount of energy via electrolysis. Electricity is still in the development phase in AoL, but the technology is well within their grasp. In fact, given that in our world two different scientists (Hall and Heroult) developed the process independently of each other virtually simultaneously, it's only a matter of time before someone on Scadrial works it out.

I shall shamelessly accept all offers of delicious snacks.

Oh, cookie! I thank ye kindly. There's a certain amount of freedom in finally giving into the Madness. Though it does leave my husband and dog wondering what all the maniacal cackling is about.

Ahoy, all! I've been mostly lurking for a couple of weeks now, reading up on a lot of the topics in the Mistborn forum. I read the Mistborn books on recommendations by friends, looking for something to fill the terrible gap between Dresden Files novels, and discovered a whole new addiction. Some of the overarching stuff I've been learning about lately means, of course, that now I'm going to have to read the whole Cosmere run. I'm also doing NaNoWriMo with an Alloy of Law era story. This might be a terrible idea, but I'm over 15,000 words in now, so I'm committed. Or should be committed.

There's another possible aspect to learning how to "see" like that, as of Alloy of Law. If someone were to learn the trick, even as a brief scan of flaring the metal to pick up on the trace elements, it seems to me that it would be possible to spot outlines of aluminum weapons hidden away. Since we know that you can block steel and iron with a layer of aluminum, that same principle could be used to ID the "null" spaces on a person's body that would block the sight.

I just got the MAG supplement yesterday, and the Allomancer Jak story was the first bit I read. I got some very odd looks from my husband as I sat there cackling like a loon.