Pechvarry

I like this.

Maybe this is covered in the RPG (Christmas was the worst time to ask me for $15 >.<), but I would really like to know about the nuances of copperminds. Or maybe i just need to read the original trilogy again. But I wonder how much this would work. If anyone's familiar with Shadowrun, Copperminds could function similarly to Skillwires (brain implant that lets you "upload" a skill to be semi-proficient with, which is then forgotten when you're done and load up a new Skillsoft). I really don't know how or why it would be useful, but Electrum/Copper seems like it could be just super cool. I would appreciate someone justifying this choice for me. I wonder if I'm the only person who just assumes an unspoken convention of <allomancy>/<feruchemy>

Hey, I'm gonna talk about Wax burning pewter now. My only problem with the theory: Vin burned metals unconsciously because she didn't understand anything about allomancy. Allomancers, even those burning a metal they've never burned before, recognize a new power source when given one to burn. Vin could sense it when she ate new metals, and Spook figured out pretty quick that what he swallowed wasn't Tin. Though I suppose Spook needed a Kelsier-Ruin ghost to tell him to burn it. But when he DID burn it, he instantly knew what he was doing. It seems like a fella as smart as Wax would notice when he's burning 2 metals instead of 1. It was a very hectic moment in his life, though, so it's still quite possible.

IIRC, Brandon said somewhere that it had to do with what happened to lost energy, right? And here, we see that objects moving into the barrier are robbed of much of their kinetic energy. So it seems like it could be a start.

e.e Sorry if I caused some forum distress. There are a lot of things I don't like seeing turned into comic books. As much as I love Firefly, I've never checked out the comic books that I heard existed. And if anyone's ever tried to keep up with the plot of the Halo games using only the Halo games, it gets kinda hard. Especially when the end of 2 does not match the start of 3. If you wanna know what you missed, you have to track down the "linking" comic book! That irritates me to no end. But a side story? Sherlock Holmes with Allomancy? Wax and Wayne just seem like the perfect candidates.

Unless he did something like separating mistborns by type. Like, "Any new mistborns cannot burn atium or its alloys, since they've been replaced with new temporal metals." And then you'd have standard mistborns, atium mistborns, sazedium mistborns, etc. Highly unlikely, though. I'm really not keen on whole new slews of powers involving the god metals. If there's such a thing as a Lerasium-Pewter Ferring with distinctly different powers than everything we've ever seen, we'll never know about it barring some sort of cah-razy catastrophic event causing the 2-3 god metals to become common-use. If you could find any of them, they'd be priceless artifacts. Imagine spending heaps of wealth to buy yourself Michelangelo's Pietà just so you can hit it with a hammer every once in a while to temporarily get some super powers.

Am I the only person who thinks Alloy of Law would be perfect for something like this? If Brandon ever intends to dip into comics as a medium for storytelling, I'd prefer it be a side project like AoL, as opposed to some important link between novels in a sequence. I would imagine that some installments would be very text heavy (the equivalent of a chapter or so) with a certain set minimum of drawings of scenes, supplemented with nice depictions of the city or characters, while other volumes (the fight scenes) would pretty much be full-on comic books. I could see the flow being rather jarring, going from speech bubbles to pages of text, but I'm sure someone in the industry could figure it out! Mostly, it'd just be nice to get a Mistborn fix every few months. Has this been discussed elsewhere?

Re: Aluminum and accessing other's metalminds. People are mentioning about how if you're filling massive amounts of identity, you have no identity. But is it impossible that you could just tap so much identity as to will yourself to be someone else? Or, at least, will yourself to subsume someone else's "spiritual sense of identity"? This interpretation would be more general-use, but require so much tapping as to be a very temporary solution (not to mention you would still need the capacity to tap any non-aluminummind).

Not throwing my support one way or another, but this has an easy explanation: not all Returned are in the Court of Gods. We only see those residing in Hallandren. The Annotations make mention of how other cultures use their Returned. So "only X number of Returned at a time" could be very feasible, if you're talking global scale.

When I read Kurkistan's first quote from Wax, I thought he was saying "We have 16 metals, and we know 16 is the Holy Number. So why are there references to 2 more?" Which would mean Chromium/Nicrosil have been discovered.

So what about slanted orbits? an item passes over your right shoulder, you Pull it so it swings past your left hip, back up to your right shoulder. It wouldn't be a perfectly circular or even elliptical orbit, I reckon, and it would still fail as the object loses speed, but it seems like it'd last a lot longer than trying to maintain a horizontal orbit. Whenever you start to feel the orbit decay, you "drop" the item and wait for it to get below your waist line before pulling it back up again. Also, we now need Kung Fu in our Mistborn books. Imagine a dude with a rope+metal ball (meteor hammer, kusari, whatever) on the end throwing it out at angles and Lurching to change its course, adding all sorts of angular velocity.

I could see Primordial Times Hoid being a voice of wisdom to the Heralds, subtly influencing them to create an order geared around preservation (concept, not shard... or is it?). Also, thanks for heads-up about the Keepers. I didn't realize (or had forgotten) there were actually 2 lines of feruchemist terrismen with a distinct break.

I wouldn't surprised if this "link" is what allows Nightblood to communicate with people. I wonder if this is a planned concept, like a super-Spiritweb, which connects people and can be exploited to various magical effects.

I imagine I'm not the first to draw a parallel between the ability to Store "spritual connection" in Feruchemy (see AoL Ars Arcanum) and the ability to notice people in Warbreaker, based on the presence/lack of Breath. This isn't a groundbreaking theory or anything. More like an interesting facet to life in the Cosmere. All people are connected to varying degrees, which assumes a sort of transcendentalism. I imagine a sort of tree, where there is a source of creation and spiritual-ness as the trunk, with thick branches being planets, and ties based off of sDNA and/or physical proximity (or something else?). So a Nalthite with some Breath is basically a leaf capable of detecting other leaves on the same twig. The Feruchemic property would function similarly, perhaps utilizing the tree in different (and probably more profound) ways. So my questions: a: Is there another thread that's so similar I should be posting there? b: Are there any other examples in the Cosmere of implied spiritual connections?

First off, LOL hard. Next up, I wonder if a Coppermind can pull off similar tricks to the "study and plan" use of mental speed. If they could have constant streams of storage/retrieval such that they could walk down a street and then tell you how many cobblestones there were and the positions of each one cracked.

Seems to me that if Brandon says "it should be a character you could figure out" that he would mean "should be a character who you know COULD look like this". Which could be Vasher. My personal belief on Returned appearance is they can change how they look, but it will always be different versions of themselves: "Me, if I were 7' and muscular. Me, if I lived on the streets for years. Me, as the bodyguard of some traveling scholars on an unfamiliar planet." Also, Blunt is the word for Vasher's personality if ever there was one. Not that I'm entirely sold on Blunt being Vasher, but I'm not going to discount it.

While I like the theory, I don't like the connection to the Seventeenth Shard. My reasoning: if Keepers were trained to join Seventeenth Shard, copperminds would know of it. Sazed would know it. And the Alloy of Law Ars Arcanum wouldn't depict the terrismen as not understanding the significance of some of their abilities. Self Counterpoint: Ruin.

I seem to remember Brandon mentioning that he chose his Alloy of Law protagonist's powers because they would be important to how things will unfurl in the mistborn universe. I suppose it's possible he was talking about Wayne, but I was under the impression at the time that he meant the main-main character, which I now know to be a pusher/skimmer. I actually believe both will be important to space travel somehow, though. Especially if they discover a way to invest objects -- feruchemic spaceships. But I'm not going to get too carried away thinking about fighter jets which can store weight while tapping speed and Pushing off of launchpads.

I do think gravity and orbit size are both large obstacles. You could really only do this with fast-moving objects, as slow-movers would require less Pull (and therefore larger orbits) and eventually, the required pull wouldn't overcome gravity and it would drop to the floor. So the less velocity the object has, the larger the orbit, until finally, you lose it completely. No amount of varying the strength of your Pull will overcome this. Though the vacuum of space would.

As neat as not-sleeping is, I'd prefer the opposite -- Tin Ferring with enhanced senses, paired with the ability to detect allomancy (and perhaps more).

On a related note, I was thinking about Space Travel when I first read Allow of Law's Ars Arcanum. I fully expect feruchemists storing warmth to function in very thin space suits, and definitely expect a character to Tap breath when their suit runs out of air. If nothing else, I expect invested Scadrians to at least wear a decent winter coat when they launch themselves off the planet.

I'd love it if Brandon saw this post. Could help him immensely at signings instead of always having to say "ehh I had to break some physics..." and tapering off without a good explanation. Unless, I suppose, it's completely not what he had in mind for the science of it.

I thought of a couple more ideas that I, at least, found pretty interesting. I was thinking about Gold ferrings and physical savants (pewter, tin). Could you even actually become a savant in this case? Imagine Spook tapping gold. Either the damage done to his body by burning too much tin is healed, and he returns to being a regular tineye or his healing allows him to carry on, largely unaffected by the drawbacks of being a savant. His body stretches and changes to accommodate the constant tin burning, but his gold lets his body exist comfortably in this state. If the first, then tin/gold is a pretty meh combo, other than the fact that you get to be a pretty reckless scout. If the latter, you're totally awesome and you recover from bright flashes and loud noises much faster. Obviously, pewter/gold is going to make a very powerful tough-guy no matter what. But if gold doesn't instantly remove savant-status, then the combo could be even better. Especially since your constant pewter burning would help you store health faster when needed. My personal belief is that the 2nd interpretation could be correct, but you would need to be actively burning tin/pewter while tapping your metalmind to prevent your body from "fixing" itself. This last bit is better suited to my metal arts and guns thread, but I don't feel like reviving it out of page 3 so apologies: a copper burner and a cadmium burner could make a pretty interesting Sniper team. By guerrilla-crawling deep into enemy territory days before "the general" arrives, they could put up a coppercloud inside a cadmium bubble to reduce human needs during the several-day wait.

I was at work tonight thinking of this post (yeah, I know...) when I remembered the Koloss. How did Vin control Koloss? Presumably, it has to do with the fact they're hemalurgic entities (I don't remember enough, and I have a habit of loaning out my favorite books for years at a time). So I've been thinking about this from the wrong perspective. It's not that spiked people are easier for Ruin in particular to control -- it could be that Hemalurgy creates a "backdoor" to someone's will. Ruin, as the author of this Master Key, was simply the most effective at employing this technique. Just like taking over Koloss, a powerful enough emotional allomancer could probably have strong effects on the psyche of a spiked individual. Hand him the gold spikes, and he'll even be kind enough to pierce himself. So yeah, I could see some foul play with hemalurgy turning up again.

That quote in the OP honestly describes the setting of Alloy of Law pretty much perfectly. The era I'd like to see depicted in the 2nd trilogy: the cusp of America pre-information age. So, technologically, similar to the 60s-80s. Probably closer to the 60s in regards to computers (dealing with The Internet and cell phones is just a pain). Probably on the 80s end of medicine (as mentioned, the metal arts supply interesting avenues for medical advancements), and definitely very current understandings of metallurgy, which requires a strong foundation in chemistry, which, in turn, requires their knowledge of chemical reactions/combustion/rocket ships to be rather modern. I also really want the setting to emphasize Chicago-style L-trains -- tracks 30' off the ground would really help Lurcher travel. Btw, I'm quite sure they specify that aluminum coatings do, indeed, block allomantic push/pulls of all assortments. Hence, Riot/Soothe and Steelpush/Ironpulls.