natc

I was on a bus. No reason to stand out

They're pretty much going "You know, you're not actually bad at metaphors . . ." "Thanks!" " . . . because most of the things you say are similes. Those are really what you're bad at." "Nerd." I was silently fistpumping the air going YES when I read that.

Instant mashed potato in a minefield! Now that would be really Instabam!

Ever since I've read Steelheart I've been thinking that very same thing. Most of David's lines were similes!

Are we really just calling him Oblit from now on? It actually sounds cute that way. A little.

Which raises a question. Is Calamity actually trying to kill us all by doing this, or is he doling out powers left and right just to see if people would be brave enough to overcome their fears? They'd be even more afraid of their weaknesses now than when they were human, since the things have become . . . you know, weaknesses. I mean, David has a point here, if something is trying to end the world this is about as efficient as trying to fish with a stick of damp dynamite.

Part of that technological advancement goes towards inventing better ways to kill large numbers of people quickly and generally wrecking things with high efficiency, but you do have a point.

Too much water also actually drowns plants, just saying.

But if you put them in order with respect to that 1-10 list then the negatives would actually be HIGHER than Kaladin and Wit!

Considering that Nale is so hell-bent on justice that he had paperwork prepared in advance just to execute Lift for trespassing , I would think most of the Heralds aren't really of sound mind right now. (Conveniently, the room she actually trespassed in really does invoke a death sentence for some reason, but what were the chances of her being caught there of all places?)

pulls out a cigarette lighter Who needs ardents or Radiants! 'cause this place isn't big enough for so many sticks! One of us needs to be fire.

I don't think he's talking about that kind of external at all.

Didn't the forms total in the hundreds? I think we'd run out of Orders.

So I just finished Warbreaker (that name is so much more meaningful now), and Lightsong apparently realized before healing Susebron that he really was a god. What did he actually recall? I'd assume it was probably a memory of his Return process. I hear the divine breath made all Return slivers of Endowment, so did he meet the shard in his memories and realized the origin of his divine breath or something along those lines?

And so the Everstorm comes . . .

Judging from what the Lord Ruler achieved during his Ascension with just that fraction of power, I am inclined to believe that Preservation is not limited to allomancy, and is essentially all-powerful save for having an upper limit to his investiture capacity. The cap seems to be so high like the other shards that it is mostly irrelevant, and the stuff just recycles itself after use like conservation of energy behaves in normal physics, but since he actually weakened himself relative to Ruin it definitely exists. With how Rashek also screwed up with it though it probably doesn't come with instructions and is storming difficult to control (damnation, I'm subconsciously using Rosharian curse words now >_>) without an average shard's millennia of practice. Also, shards in general can power each other's magic (e.g. atium), so the individual systems are probably more control schemes arbitrarily assigned for human use than actual limitations for our godly fellows here.

hmm . . . forge soulcasted fire back into a stick? Can one actually stamp a ball of fire?

Won't be the first time we see gaseous, wispy investiture with translucent coloring. *glares at HOA and Preservation

That triple post. 50 minutes apart too. Well allomancy only has a gradient going between low burn and flared. I'd assume you mean burning a lump of normal duralumin in order to burst a duraliminmind you're also burning? I guess same thing as duralumin bursting anything else? Release the power way more strongly than you'd have any business needing that much for in such a short period of time that you really shouldn't even consider it unless you think the immediate effect would help? Launching yourself off a roof by bursting steel is similarly useless unless you also have spare steel in a bottle to save yourself on your trip back down. I'd guess bursting your duraluminminds would make everyone trust you so much they'd believe anything you say to them for what, 2 seconds? Which would actually be more effective than you'd assume now that I think about it. I've seen people here say that storing and tapping connection might work both ways and make you trust them as well, so if that's true it actually removes the risk of the "connection" working on yourself in reverse and giving you doubts afterwards. Since it's gone. Of course whatever it is you wanted them to trust you on it better be worth it right at that moment.

(Only just finished AOL myself, so I guess I'm a newbie? I wanted to read it earlier but apparently Christmas = slow shipping.) Those are just their discrepancies as allomantic functions though, aren't they? And creating mistborn wasn't even the main function of lerasium burning, but just the side-effect, was it not? Quick skim of the Coppermind I just made suggests making an existing Mistborn burn it would do something completely different. It's basically the condensed metal form of Preservation-essence anyway, like the Well's liquid stuff and the Mists being more or less a gaseous variety, if I recall correctly. Both submerging yourself in the liquid pool at the Well as well as burning large quantities of (obviously less dense) mist managed to make Vin ascend, so maybe swallowing enough lerasium and flaring it would also cause ascension after a while? Before that occured the Mist did nothing beyond fueling all of Vin's powers at once, so perhaps that's also what lerasium's main function is? Unles for some bizarre reason a change in physical state would make it do something drastically different even though allomancy functions off of atomic structure before anything else. It would make a bit of sense too, to be honest. Atium is essentially the all-purpose hemalurgic spike material on the flip-side of things, and the Mist made for all-purpose allomantic fuel in that one scene. Allomantic atium, on the other hand, is far from as impressive as lerasium, but in the end you are really using the "wrong" power source to fuel the system that Preservation created. And in true Ruin fashion, since Allomantic atium only shows the future up to a couple of seconds, it serves no practical purpose beyond reacting to an immediate threat i.e. combat and by extension killing people. While lerasium (and I guess the Mist if we're staying on that line of thought) in combat actually doesn't do anything remotely spectacular in the least that you can't do with anything else. Perhaps lerasium used as a spike would also have powerful but (relative to hAtium) rather "meh" and Preservation-y effects. We . . . don't know what a spike like that would do yet do we? Speaking of, sticking to the line of thought of Mist and lerasium being a similar material like they are to the Well-fluid both god metals when used in their own shards' metallic art actually don't do anything that the normal 16 metals can't, but serve as stronger alternatives to all of them at once (queue Vin's "mist"push tearing off TLR's atium minds and flinging them out the window when steelpushes won't actually have any kind of effect whatsoever). I think they honestly mirror each other rather consistently. Now I really wonder after all of that what lerasiumminds would store.

Well, I just finished the trilogy and AOL myself, and by the end of HOA Sazed seems to need some experimenting going on to get bringing back the dead done right. He was just figuring out that putting the body back together doesn't automatically work, though it seems he assumes he probably could if he can pinpoint the method. Problem with being nearly omnipotent without omniscience is that even though you can basically do anything you have no idea how to actually go about doing it. It's not like there's an instruction manual laying around for resurrecting dead people, moving mountains, or altering planetary orbits. Though it's been 300 years. Maybe he's got it down by now. But that'd be interfering wouldn't it?

So, judging from that WoB . . . technically, during the pre-Harmony Era one can say that humans on Scadrial in general were more or less all "latent" allomancers due to that excess Preservation chunk granting them sentience, and whenever the well refills and the Mists start their work they just take 16% of the population accurate up to as many decimal places as the number of people will allow pseudo-randomly and tries to snap them? Being of a bloodline already more "saturated" with Preservation's power due to ancestral Lerasium consumption just causes the balance to be more easily tipped by normal trauma, essentially? I hear in AoL the snapping process has been somewhat modified by Sazed, but he doesn't really have much reason to just change the percentage does he? It should average out close to that number, if not making it freakishly exact. 1 out of 50 is still pretty close after all (I only brought this up in the first place because I remembered "about 1 out of 50" being mentioned in HoA somewhere when they were checking up on the death tolls before they realized it was exactly 16% everywhere). The system works well the way it did, no point fixing it if it ain't broke, and as far as Sazed seems to care the excrutiating pain necessary was the only problem he saw with it. Maybe the average will drift a little from the modifications though . . . Technically it was already shifted since not all the noble lines have died yet (and Spook has decendents at that, and he's Mistborn now, probably close to Lerasium-level since "divine" intervention was involved), so it was already inaccurate during HoA. The mists don't seem global now either. The fact that the percentage still isn't very different would suggest it's being directed still though. Gotta leave it to Preservation, even without consciousness he can still do calculations in his head well.

Well, I'm new to the forum and all (first post really . . .), but I did come over from just finishing Hero of Ages. The Misting population (the natural misting population at least) was exactly 16% there, so would it be reasonable to assume the 1 out of 50 people is a Misting/Ferring statistic was a rough estimate rounded off to 20%? Makes the maths more confusing, but as I understand 16 is an important number to the Shards. Though 1/50 is more than accurate enough to picture the scale of rarity we're dealing with here, of course. I was just curious.

Wound up finding Alloy of Law on sale somewhere and went for that first, and also bought Way of Kings on a whim, but I was wondering for any further book suggestions. Preferably the Cosmere stuff, since I'm pretty much buying Firefight for sure anyway (Steelheart was actually my first ). Which Cosmere entry would be more similar in the high-fantasy tone to the Mistborn trilogy? I don't normally do much retroactive book-purchasing, but this is some good stuff we have here and I'd prefer to jump into something more similar before potentially easing myself off into a different genre outright (at least AOL shares a setting to make it more fun to get into. Well, they all do in the grand scheme of things, but you know, on the scale of planets they don't).