Deus Ex Biotica

Huh. In light of the odd things Brandon mentioned about burning your own Hemalurgic spike, even surviving with a small amount of power is a curious possibility.

From the Crafygames website: Does anyone know anything about this? Was it vetted by Brandon Sanderson, and thus capable of giving us some new canonical data, or is it going to be pure (albeit probably very well-written and exciting) fanfiction? -- Deus Ex Biotica

Even stranger, we have previously been told that the future in Scadrial is mostly deterministic - only people who can see the future (using Atium, Electrum, Worm Spice, etc.) can change it. Now, maybe using Feruchemy to increase your fortune is no more "changing the future" than using steel to throw things at people would be - exactly how and how much you will use your powers is determined in advance. Still, it feels different to me. -- Deus Ex Biotica P.S. Also, each time I see it called "fortune," I get the notion of a Metalmind which stores money. Invest in the Chromium Bank of Terris! Luckily, this passes quickly.

Interesting question: can you draw color from gasses? Either way, I doubt you could use Nightblood, since he's alive.

I would do SCIENCE with it. Studying BioChroma with modern tools to measure things? It would be priceless. When Awakened things move, is my body getting much colder, or is the surrounding air? If not, in what form is all that kinetic energy being stored when the Breaths are in my body. Probably something electromagnetic - it does alter the frequency of nearby light. Does Life Sense allow me to know what picture a human is seeing on a card? Can I break the training of guard dogs? If I use the right lenses, can Perfect Hue apply to infrared and ultraviolet scales of light? Do things inside of mircowave ovens look different? What about Cathode Ray TVs? The possibilities are almost endless. -- Deus Ex Biotica P.S. Also, I would not age or get sick, and could send Raggedy Ann dolls to bring me breakfast in bed.

Or, at least, none that we know of. More so than most of Brandon Sanderson's books, even, Warbreaker is all about how the magic is still developing, and other places will have other tricks. Heck, the annotations seem to saying that Yesteel knows how to mass-produce Nightbloods. But, yes, the ability to forcefully remove Breath does seem ideologically opposite to the rest of Awakening. -- Deus Ex Biotica

Fun fact: that hat made it almost impossible for me not to picture Tonk Fah as Gannondorf while reading.

On a related note: do we know whether any full Feruchemists exist now? Feruchemy still seems fairly concentrated in Terris, which in turn seems to be fairly secretive, so the book doesn't even mention them as legends, but that same isolation might make for a more concentrated breeding population than Allomancers have. I suppose that, given the incredible power of a full Feruchemist (maybe we should just call these "Sages," just as we use Mistborn instead of "Full Allomancer"?), it's most likely that they'll be gone, or at least absurdly rare, now. I simply cannot help wondering. -- Deus Ex Biotica

Huh. That entirely did not occur to me, but would be amazingly awesome if true.

Alloy of Law does make some nods to the speed of bullets. For example, in the prologue, Wax thinks about how once he hears a shot, it's too late to dodge it. That said, sometimes people do seem to be reacting impossibly fast. Wayne, at least, has his shtick of being a really erratic target, so he can watch for when people are taking aim at him (or, in one case, at Wax), and then throwing up his bubble, without needing to wait for shots actually being fired. Coinshots* are a little less excusable - it's established that they can only Push bullets if they know the shot is coming, but that still requires almost inhumanly fast reflexes, and people like Push are willing to bet they can do it many times in succession. So, that probably comes down to "action movie logic". Pushing on bullets you've fired doesn't seem like a contradiction to me, though. After all, there's no reason why Wax couldn't start pushing before the bullet clears the barrel, and if he Pushes at the same moment he pulls the trigger, the effects should still be the same as described. -- Deus Ex Biotica * How long will Scadrial still know them as "coinshots," now that there are so many small pieces of metal to Push, I wonder...

I had been assuming that as well, right up until the possibility of Wax and Wayne reading Jurassic Park came up. Now, I am desperate for a way this might happen. ... maybe someone could start putting Koloss spikes into crocodiles?

I do not think it is possible to charge a spike from someone without killing them, but I suppose I do not know that for certain. As for gaining the ability to use someone else's metalminds, I had been wondering that myself. It is doubly compelling if those Metalminds hold Feruchemical Spiritual abilities...

Wayne is awesome, too, yeah. Although, now that you mention it, is that the only time in the book he talks about actually buying things, rather than trading them?

I'm pretty sure a Pewterarm could do that safely, though. More seriously, Vin wasn't just running on pure instinct. She could sense how large her reserves of "luck" were, and used them willfully, she could even tell after drinking a vial of metals that it was the same as her luck, but much more. So, if she was protected from bad alloys before, why not after?

Ruin must have been a factor, even then. Otherwise, Marsh would have been less unhelpful.

Also, virtually everything Ranette says and does. That woman is comedy gold.

Okay, I think I understand what you're saying now, Winrunner - you're saying that Compounding is mostly about short bursts of burning metalminds and storing it, so that you're almost always drawing upon absurdly full minds rather than doing the full cycle all the time. That makes sense to me as a process, I suppose (Miles does note that he draws upon his Goldminds all the time, but does not specify burning them), but I don't understand why the Lord Ruler would have impaled his Atium Minds into his arms (thereby leaving himself open to Ruin's influence, or at least to Soothing, since he must have known about that weakness), rather than just having a bunch of small ones hidden among s jewelry in different places so that nobody could remove them all from him at once. -- Deus Ex Biotica

Something really fascinating I noticed when flipping through the Brandonthology: 17th Shard: Are there a limited amount of atium and lerasium alloys for each metal? Brandon: Hmm, yes…I suppose there would be but there are… 17th Shard: More than sixteen? Brandon: Yeah, way more than sixteen. 17th Shard: Oh wow. Okay. That's fascinating. More than sixteen and less than infinite. Brandon: Yes. So... maybe trying to guess won't accomplish much.

I didn't have a quote for Inquisitors being able to burn their own spikes - I had simply heard it was in the Brandonthology. Now, I have done some digging, and here's what I know about spike-burning: That last thing is in reference to burning other people's spikes, but I added it here for completeness. Anyway. Inquisitors no longer have human physiology, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything about humans directly. But Inquisitors can burn their own spikes. Wax muses that, from what he's heard, once you start compounding, it is dangerous to stop. If nobody else knows the page, I can look it up tomorrow. But, if you agree that you'd have to keep on Compounding age constantly, doesn't that mean that the Lord Ruler, at least, was burning his implanted Metalminds? He fell apart immediately once they were off, and if he were burning a separate reserve within his body, that would not have happened. -- Deus Ex Biotica

It just now struck me how deeply sad and ironic it is that the people in the world most connected to the cosmic force of protecting and keeping safe everything that exists... are known almost exclusively for their power as assassins, and their ability to interact with pieces of cosmic destruction.

I seem to have stumbled across a small controversy. When we get descriptions of Compounding, I had always assumed that people set up Metalminds breaking their skin, filled them, then burned them, without any intervening steps. Other people, however, say that they Allomancers cannot burn metal unless it is in their stomachs, and someone Channeling would have to swallow their Metalmind (or a part of it) to begin Channeling, and are probably just filling and tapping like anyone else most of the time. The data we have outside of the books seem to be these: some years ago, he did say that Allomancers can only burn metals in their belly. More recently, he noted that an Inquisitor could burn their spikes (though it would be painful. Granted, Inquisitors are not human, so whether these statements contradict each other is, again, a matter of interpretation. The only human Compounder we get to see much detail about is Miles Hundredlives, so I have formed my own interpretation around what we know of him. I am positive Miles was burning for the following reasons: (1) People talk about removing Miles' metalminds. The obstacle to this that they're all over his body, NOT that even once you remove then, he has however much gold he managed to swallow first. (2) We Miles' POVs where hours pass between battles, but there is no reference to grinding down and swallowing fresh Metalminds. (3) There is an immediately observable difference between Miles' healing and Wayne's. Wayne gets injured, and fixing it takes time and clear discomfort. If Miles breaks his leg, the first side hit healed before the crack reaches the other side. Wax and Wayne both talk about how only Compounding could allow that. (4) Once you start Compounding, it is dangerous to ever stop. Why assume that he did? Do other people agree? Am I the only one who had assumed Compounders worked this way? -- Deus Ex Biotica

Wait... is feeling like a homicidal Happy Gilmore not normal? Darn. Regarding the size of spikes, I had assumed that, no matter how small they were, you could only fit one per Bind Point, though I may be wrong. The idea of stealing so much Preservation from people that you actually net a larger Energy Web is... fascinating.

Good point! I wonder if that means Sliverists believe that Ironeyes is a servant of the Sliver (which is a hilarious mistake to make), or if it is just Steris and other people who mis-categorize Sliverism as being about Ironeyes at all.

The only time I ever posted an Amazon review, it was for a book of alleged history which contained a number of serious inaccuracies. The review was somehow taken down within the day. Thus did my motivation to review things on Amazon die. I suppose I really should try again in order to tell more people about the awesomeness that is Brandon Sanderson, though. Major complaint: gone. Aiken Frost: Sure, there are some neat scenarios available in The Final Empire, and it'd make for some cool one-shots. There's nothing I can think of there which I would want to play or run for longer, though. And Alloy, as you say, feels like it was designed to be an adventure game setting. Although, for some reason, the more I try to think of adventures and NPCs for it, the more I wind up trying to mirror Trigun characters using different Twinborn combos. It's very odd. -- Deus Ex Biotica P.S. Wait... did Spook really make a bunch of refugees struggling to handle the destruction of all they had known start using uncomfortable (to them) street slang at formal functions for the sake of a joke? Never underestimate the humor of someone from Kelsier's crew!

You are absolutely right about the first part, and I was probably being too free with talking about technologies in terms of years from our world. It'll be really cool to see what sort of society Brandon Sanderson, with his dislike of exactly mirroring a given historical era, will give us. As for airplanes in particular, though, I would bet money they show up in the next trilogy. Miles very specifically thinks about them, and how the Words Of Founding mention them, in his second POV chapter, and that's got "Foreshadowing" all over it. -- Deus Ex biotica