Djarskublar

Thanks for taking a fairly critical post well, this one will be more critical, but not of any individual point, just one of your beliefs. The thing is, there are no Powers of Creation, there are just different volumes of Investiture. Everything in the Cosmere was created through Investiture from Adonalsium or the Shards of him. This isn't The Name of the Wind, where there is sympathy, alchemical, and naming magic all in one book. There is only Investiture powering things. It just takes different forms. For example, you mentioned that you don't think that the ChayShan draws power from the Dor. Even though you didn't express it that way, the Dor is in the Cognitive realm pretty much entirely, so there isn't any other energy source for a ChayShan user to draw on. A user can't "rely solely on Sel’s Investiture," they can only access the Dor. To attempt another explanation, you appear to believe that there are Investiture powered magics that can only affect the self, and other powers that come from some nebulous Powers of Creation. That is patently false. Take something you think of as Creation magic, Surgebinding is probably the best example, and lets see how it works. First, the Highstorm passes by, and any exposed spheres are charged with Investiture. The Shardic Intent of the Light is as yet unknown as to its composition, but it can be presumed to be from Honor, Cultivation, or more likely, some mix of the two. Then Kaladin comes along and sucks in the Stormlight. He grabs a rock and Lashes it towards the sky. What happens here is a mere transfer of energy. Some of the Light he has breathed in goes into the rock, and that powers the rock's defiance of normal gravity. He isn't accessing some "Power of Creation," he is just using Investiture as he wills within the bounds set by the magical manifestation of Investiture. On a more concrete note, Brandon has never said anything about some Powers of Creation, only Investiture. Everything in the universe came from Investiture once held by Adonalsium. All the matter is just converted Investiture. The Shards are large chunks of Mr A's power, and there are some bits that didn't get claimed, like the pool on First of the Sun. The thing is though, you can manipulate most anything to your will if you have enough Investiture, and this is unbounded by some rules governing a magic system. This can most readily be seen by looking at anyone who has taken the power of the Well of Ascension. They temporarily gain access to a stupendous amount of Investiture, and this allows them to cause things as they will. Their mind also expands somewhat to accommodate their newfound ability and allow them to make such changes as altering the DNA of every living thing on Scadrial. This is the closest thing you can get to the Power of Creation (not your definition of it, though). I think that covers that pretty well, so on to something else interesting. I wouldn't really say the mists have a 'main' function, they are just power available to Preservation that allows someone to Ascend, or allows Preservation to act on Scadrial in the way you described, or any number of other things not shown in book. It's raw Preservation in gas form, it can do what it wants. Something I want to clarify with this, though, is that everyone (on Scadrial) is Connected to Preservation because it has a bit of power in all of the people. Connection isn't just a thing allowing power, you soul is basically comprised of your Connections to everything. Kelsier developed a strong Connection to Ruin because of his bloodlust and destruction. It wasn't due to any magic, it was just that his actions and emotions emulated Ruin pretty well, so he Connected to Ruin. Burning metal, then, isn't increasing your Connection to Preservation, it is only opening a pathway for its power to flow through you. You connect to the power source like plugging in a cord. A cord that happens to shrink as you use it... maybe that's not the best analogy. What matters for becoming an Allomancer is having a strong enough Connection to Preservation from conception that allows you to Snap under stress. The stress creates the initial cracks in the soul, not the use of power, and using lots of power puts pressure on those cracks, widening them, and eventually causing savantism. You have to be a broken person for power to come to you, basically. This is especially evident with Surgebinders. All in all, we don't agree on a lot, but most of that comes from your idea of Powers of Creation, so unless I can change your mind on that, there isn't much I can really do about any of your other thoughts I disagree with. Good work, though. It makes me happy that there are other people who think about this as much as I do, though Kirk's thoughts on speedbubbles trumps both of us XD

If in the future a group of people used robots to terraform a planet to be easily habitable and then within the space of a few days/weeks colonized it heavily, what would the sudden change in cognition look in the CR? What would a planet dropping into the CR look like? For clarification, by colonize it heavily I mean that they move millions of people into homes on the surface and had all of them transplant a bunch of trees/crops onto the planet to get some extra vegetation. Toss in some wildlife for variety. Yes, this would be a logistic nightmare, but ignore that aspect of the question

We know that putting a spike in a vial of blood (and presumably making the blood swish around to be non-stagnant) prevents Hemalurgic decay, but I haven't the faintest for aluminum. Good question.

I think it requires an inherent shift in your self perception, which is not easy to do with wounds. If you just perceive yourself as really buff, your muscles will get bigger. On the other hand, wounds have those irritating little things known as pain signals that would make it very difficult to shift your self image away from having the wounds. This brings me to the reason I am semi-necroing this thread: solipsism. If you could become a true/nearly true solipsist as a Returned, you could become extremely powerful, able to morph your reality/self at will. Of course, it wouldn't be a healthy mental state, but it could potentially allow for some fantastic transformations, including quick-self healing.

You put some serious thought into this, clearly, but I have a few bones to pick with it too. I was seriously befuddled by some of the things you have said in your post. ^ This for example. Of course it uses investiture as the fuel. What else would it use? Chulls? The other major problem with your post is your terrible naming sense. We already have names for all these things, and you are just adding confusion to the mix. What you call 'Powers' are just Shards. What you call 'Creation Magic' are just external manifestations of Investiture, and 'Investiture Magic' -aside from being a really confusing and bad name for it- are just internal manifestations of Investiture. Though the exact definition you present and the definitions that are understood for external/internal manifestations differ somewhat, they are more canon, and therefor more useful when asking questions and discussing things. Now on to comments on your actual points, and some clarifications of information I think you have wrong or that my speculation differs on. An example of an external manifestation, or what you call Creation Magic, would be Allomancy. You burn metal and cause a change external to you. This isn't, as you put it, using Investiture to Connect with a Shard. You are already Connected. What is really going on here is you allow (or force/get, depending on how you look at it) the power to flow through you through a focus, in this case a specific metal, and then you have a shaped Investiture in you that you can use to exert a changing 'force.' You aren't using Investiture to Connect, you use a physical focus. You have this a bit off. The Shard has x amount of Investiture available to it. When a piece of it it broken off, intentionally or otherwise, this is known as Splintering. The only real difference between, say, a spren and a Shard is the sheer quantity of Investiture they have. If you had a person and pumped a truly massive amount of Investiture into them, their mind expands and they Ascend. That is what happened to Vin with the mists. There are 3 important levels of Investiture. There are normal levels, where you may or may not have the right stuff to perform magic, but can't do much more. There is a higher level, where raw Investiture, or an Invested inanimate object, has enough Investiture available to it that it reaches a critical mass of the stuff. This level only matters if the Investiture is left out of the control of something sentient for long enough. If left alone, it will eventually develop sentience of its own. The third critical mass of Investiture is where you have enough that your mind expands, you lose your normal physical form, and you Ascend. There are outliers with this, like Wax and the Bands or awakening an object to sentience, where you temporarily move partially into a higher category. You touch on this in your next point, but you apparently haven't made the connection between the two. For your examples, you need to know that what matters for classification is if the fuel comes from an external source, like a Shard, or from the user's own soul. So I would say that we can't tell with Aviar, because we don't know enough about what the birds are doing. They could be tapping the local Pool for power, or the Pool could have basically infused them in a manner similar to Heightenings and granted them passive abilities. Transferring Breaths is a Command, so it would be a Creation magic under your definition, since you are morphing the soul of the recipient. A more pressing concern is that Breath is weird. It is basically the photon of the Investiture world. It exhibits properties of multiple forms of Investiture, much as photons have the properties of particles and waves, so Breath really defies any decent classification until Brandon gives us some better information. There is a long standing debate over whether Breath is kinetic Investiture or not, and I don't really want to get into that one with this thread. Returned are much the same as normal awakeners, but with the restriction that they can't use/transfer their one massive Breath without dying. It is stapling their Cognitive shadow to their body, so if they use it, their mind moves on to the Beyond. That is effectively the only difference between them and regular people. Well, that and their ability to manipulate their spiritweb (and therefor appearance) at will, probably via that Breath. The Old Magic is an external magic, because whatever the Nightwatcher is causes a change in your soul that is external to her. Think of her as just another person in this sense. If she were just some ridiculously powerful person, you would likely think of her differently. Use of the Mists is just using Preservation's power for your abilities, in this case Allomancy, without the need for a metal focus to filter it. The mists snapping people is just the mist causing extreme physical distress to snap people. That is the standard method in that day-- beat up the person and see what happens. Also, you failed to classify Hemalurgy, but it is also a bit strange, and we don't know if it actually channels any of Ruin's power directly to make a spike. It does increase your Connection to Ruin, though, so there is that. For Sel, this is where I most heavily disagree with you. You say the ChayShan must be internal when that doesn't really make sense in the context the planet is giving us. ALL of the powers on Sel come from the same system. The one deft thing you said in your post is that they are balkanized-- I really liked that way of putting it. I don't want to into a TON of detail, but here are my suspicions for Sel. The first thing to know is that you can use Aons outside Elantris, but they are much, much weaker, as we saw when Raoden teleported away. Elantris is just a massive Aon that buffs up Elantrian's power so that they are truly useful. You say the ChayShan is internal, but Dakhor monks are probably extremely similar. Dakhor monks and the Listeners appear to do something similar. They use an external Investiture to change their physical form and physical/mental properties. Be it the Dor or a spren, they seem to do something with a similar mechanic. Performing the ChayShan is probably most similar to burning pewter with a measure of either normal sense heightening to the point of echolocation or some sort of lifesense that lets them fight with their eyes closed. Regardless, they would pretty much certainly be channeling power from the Dor to perform it. Otherwise, it would just be a Feruchemy variant and not a Selish magic. The only reasonable explanation for the potions is that they have to be brewed in Forton's homeland. That is the location that potion masters can connect their brews to the Dor to allow them to infuse the potion with actual power. Once the potion is brewed, it is already Invested, so drinking it is no longer location dependent, hence the potion drunk by Hrathen and Sarene work on them. Overall a very good post, just mind that the Powers of Creation are Investiture directed by those with truly massive power that defies the protective barriers provided mortals that channel how the Investiture is used. This allows them to do as they will with the power. Those holding the power of the Well reached that level of Investiture, but other than that, you really need to perform a normal Ascension to reach that level. Hence, what you call the Powers are effectively just Shards. I would be happy to also provide my feedback for your theory in addition to those you mentioned above if you just shoot me a PM with your draft of it.

It would only interfere while he is burning metal. Otherwise, it is just a few shavings in his gut. I would say this theory is plausible. Not confirmed, but certainly possible. Whether or not he would want to in the mentioned instances is up for debate. I would say he is a skilled enough speaker to get away with it without magic. And knowing his personality, he would probably think it is cheating if he used magic for that sort of thing.

I can see two possible explanations for how it would work. The first is the assumption I have been working under, where you die and all three aspects are separated from each other. They begin to 'degrade' in their own ways, and the mind is swiftly sent to the Beyond. There was another thing Brandon said in the update that would be relevant to this point, that Investiture replaces/infuses the mind like petrified wood when exposed under whatever relevant criteria are present that he didn't make explicit, but I assume is just whatever process you use to make a Sliver. That is what a Sliver is. They can still go Beyond, but their mind is now made of Investiture that sticks around. Because they have a mind made of Investiture, they have a Connection to the SR and can stick around. The other explanation you seem to ascribe to: that the mind and soul are Connected right up until the mind goes Beyond. I assume a full strength Connection for the duration of your stay in the CR for this, with the caveat of an alternative described below. The process of moving Beyond could also be described as the deterioration of the Connection between you mind and soul, and once it is severed you are Beyond. That is similar to your apparent view, but does differ mechanically. That would make the Connection either a tether holding you in the Realms, or without the Connection to anything you can't be perceived, so you are effectively gone. That presents interpretations for both religious and atheistic people, which is good from Brandon's perspective. It may just be an emotional attachment, but I like my original description best, and it definitely has the most interesting implications for other things, such as the 'placement' of Shardic power over time.

Well, I assumed that if you have died, your 3 aspects are separated. Not that your body is separated from your mind/soul combo. So his soul is separate from his mind at that point. Which means I assumed before this that he would have to rebuild his soul to reattach as well. That may have been a faulty assumption, but I think it would be supported by what happened in Emperor's Soul. His soul was separated from his mind when he died.

I have a new theory about what Hemalurgic decay is. The core piece of information that is relevant to my new theory is something @Argent got out of Brandon in the Stormlight update #6: Q: Is death in the Cosmere a two-stage process? It seems to me like (under normal circumstances) the body dies first, sending the mind fully in the Cognitive Realm; the soul, presumably, remains in the Spiritual for the entire process. I am a little unclear on what happens after that though - what is it that passes into the Beyond, just the mind? Does the soul / spiritual aspect / Spiritweb just kind of... break down in the Spiritual Realm, turn into free investiture? A: Yes. It's a two stage process, and most of what you said is correct. The odd thing is, though, that the spiritweb doesn't completely break down (just like your body doesn't immediately break down.) Even after a long time, there's a record of that spirit web in the spiritual realm. And before I go into how I am interpreting that, some background on ideas that also contributed: Time and Place don't really exist in the Spiritual Realm. At a guess, there is likely data about them there, but space-time isn't as relevant/existent. Hemalurgy 'staples' soul chunks onto people to grant them abilities/traits. Hemalurgic spikes 'decay' and slowly lose their powers if they aren't in contact with (flowing?) blood. Now for some actual rhetoric! I always assumed that when someone died, their Investiture dissipated back into the Shard that it came from while their mind went on to the Beyond. I thought something similar was happening with Hemalurgy in that there was a chunk of soul that was ripped off the person and attached to someone else via the spike. When the spike wasn't in someone, the chunk of web decayed and the spike lost power. Now, though, I think that the spike is just hard wiring a Connection between the chunk of web that got ripped off and the person who has the spike. It is like adding a short to a circuit, sort of, anyway. When the spike isn't active and in blood, though, the power of Ruinous intent isn't maintaining the line, and the Connection between the spike and the web decays. The chunk of web probably decays at about the same rate that the web of a normal dead person does, which is apparently slowly, as evidenced by the WoB above. With that in mind, this has definite implications for Kel's resurrection. He was brought back within a few years, since he went and helped out the SoScads only a few years after the Catacendre. This means that his spiritweb was still mostly intact, so they just had to Hemalurgically staple it back onto a physical form. It is probably stapling his mind, soul, and body back together all at once, or there are spikes for each Connection. Presumably, he functions similar to Kandra now, in that if the spikes are removed, he will cease to survive, but he could just get stapled back together... creepy.

I made a Reddit account just for the 'AMAs' Updates. Now I have yet another reason to use it

I personally loved era 1 more. I of course love both. I didn't feel the stock character aspects of W/W. They are more farfetched, for sure, but they aren't impossible people by any means. Wayne in particular is... out there. I could still see someone like him being a real person. His compulsive thievery made me think of Kender the whole time (not to be confused with Kandra). Having read Dragonlance made it much easier to understand him. He is a kleptomaniac who totally rejects standard societal ideas of monetary value. That alone makes him interesting. His scenes with Ranette, particularly in Bands, showed his hidden depth indirectly. He appears to do stuff randomly, but he is actually a good planner. His gun phobia is totally realistic. Not exactly highly probable, but still possible. The only reason for saying he is unrealistic is how many unlikely traits have been crammed together in him. There isn't really anything wrong with that though. He honestly reminds me quite a bit of Mat in WoT. Era one were simply more fleshed out because of the nature of the stories, so I like them more. I am also the cold calculating type, so the end of HoA was... pleasing. I like it when authors have the guts to kill important people, or just depict and discuss death in general. It bothers me when TV shows or movies cut away from people dying, or the whole 'bullets hit the dust around their feet for no good reason.' The take away is that HoA is one of the best books of all time. Didn't see that end coming, and it still blows me away to think of how well it was pulled off.

That was a thing through the whole book. I would have to say it was the most obvious foreshadowing I have ever seen. And that is saying something. I wouldn't worry too much about it personally. Other characters mentioned listening as well, and I don't think that they will all end up being particularly or even of minor importance. Second, was this the urchin that Lift rescued from Nale? If so, maybe the infusion of Stormlight caused a Death Rattle-esqe thing to occur that was designed to push her to the next Ideal. That was just some random crap off the top of my head, though, so take that idea with a large pinch of salt.

I don't remember the math well enough to agree or disagree with any of these answers, except for @The One Who Connects's answer... sorry. I think the next important question to ask is how this would affect probabilities of becoming and Allomancer. Assuming that all of these alloys are made to be like FE atium, then they should have mistings for them once the Shard is invested. There may be more of these god metals that are like Lerasium and can be burned by anybody, but I don't think that is a good assumption at the moment. The question then lies in what the effect is on the proportion of people who gain Allomantic abilities, and then also how it affects your probability of having specific powers. Would it be a straight even probability, so that any of the powers is literally ~1/1,000,000? Would it be related to the Connections you had to specific Shards at birth? Would it be more along the line of which Shard has the most power invested (and therefor, probably the base 16 and/or atium would be the most common, since there are, presumably, no Lerasium mistings)? Or would it be some weird Realmatic interaction that deals with some random cosmic factors surrounding your birth that would determine which you would be. Interesting lines of thought that we don't have the resources to answer effectively, unfortunately.

Hmmm... I assumed it was more along with 'a keen eye for ___.' If they are the spren equivalent of liberal arts majors, then I can see them being hard to understand. Except that is Wyndle speaking, the truly archetypal liberal arts major (at least according to the local connotation for the word)...

Except for the fact that we have WoB that they are Truthwatchers. Your point about their memory loss stands, but it doesn't actually apply to the Order of Ym and Stump. Before getting WoB, that would have been a good point though. I agree with this. With the caveat that the Ring may actually govern multiple types of spren, say perhaps the part that is more of Cultivation. Speaking of, do we have any good reason to believe that the Orders are evenly distributed? I always assumed that they were on something of a sliding scale where there are Honor and Cultivationspren at either end and then spren types in between with a fairly linear shading of H/C ratios. I just questioned that assumption. Maybe the distribution is more like 7 spren that are more of Honor and 3 for Cultivation. I will take this to another thread, though.

I get the feeling that, yes, it requires certain actions on the part of certain people, but that such actions would only matter if done on a large scale. Kind of like how burning metal on Scadrial technically reduces their metal supply, but it isn't really an issue because there aren't enough Allomancers for it to really matter.

One of us really just needs to ask how much of it he has used and for what purpose(s). The fact that we are even having this discussion is kind of pitiful once you consider how many times this question has been asked, especially since, unless the answer is something other than 'for Allomancy,' it isn't particularly game changing at this point since we have seen him use Allomancy. It sounds like he is either pulling our legs with his answers, or he is fed up with the question. It is entirely possible that he just burned the darn thing and was done, but we don't know that for sure. Lerasium is just so interesting though, so I don't want the last known piece of the stuff to be used for something so... common (the more archaic meaning, I guess).

I have discussed this in the past, and the conclusion I came to was that he wants to use it to become an Elantrian. I fully agree with the idea of him only using part of the bead to become a moderately powerful Mistborn. Mistborn are too OP to not want to do that. That is exactly what I would say if he had done both by only eating part of it. You have seen him use Allomancy. That doesn't mean you have seen him use it at 'Lerasium Mistborn' level. He was answering the question relatively straightforwardly, except for the detail of how much he ate. Why say something confusing like that if he was fine with confirming it? I see two possible answers. One: he only ate part of the bead. Two: he is using a medallion, which is also entirely possible.

I think the difference between these is like in the Princess Bride. You are dead, but there's different types of dead, you see. There's a little dead, mostly dead, and truly dead (and also no longer of this world once you have moved Beyond). A little dead would be where you are decapitated, but heal it off immediately. There appears to be no lasting impact from this occurring occasionally beyond the standard effects of using large quantities of Investiture. There is mostly dead, like what happened to Wax. Your C-Shadow has left your body and your Connections begin to break up. It is still possible to restore such a person, but it will take more power and skill. Done incorrectly or inefficiently, we can expect negative consequences with capacities in certain Realms such as those experienced by the Returned and their memories. I would presume that the Investiture of your Connections haven't fully dissipated back into the Shards from whence they came, they have merely been cut, so it isn't totally unreasonable to restore such a person. Then there is truly dead. A person in this state has lost all of their normal Connections to the physical beyond any that are strictly necessary to maintain a Cognitive presence. This is the boat Kelsier was in with Spook. I suspect that it is extremely difficult to return non-slivers to life at this point. It may be impossible depending on how long it takes to move Beyond versus reaching this state. They may be one and the same, which is an extremely interesting line of thought. It suggests that what Kel did at the Well granted him some residual Connection to the Physical Realm that acted as a tether to prevent him from moving Beyond.

My take on the Sovereign spike not being special is that it doesn't grant an ability we haven't seen before. It could grant any power, just not something truly unusual. There are still probably a lot of atium mistings, but they never find out because they don't have any to burn (even after Sazed changed Allomancy, I still think atium has mistings, the probability is just different now with more metals). In my opinion, an atium spike would only be special in that you would have to find someone to spike the ability out of, which means feeding lots of people bits of atium. In other words, it is almost certainly just a standard coinshot spike, but could be anything if the bindpoint applies. I would bet he has other spikes that do do 'something special' i.e. staple a Cognitive Shadow to a body. It is more likely to be in the same place as an Inquisitor's linchpin spike, like, I would be a bit surprised if it was anywhere else. I have other things to say, but other things to do, so they will have to wait. Lets just say that I disagree with most of Pagerunner's post except for the bit about Heralds.

I have actually asked Brandon about this. I asked if being spiked with some Allomancy and then becoming a savant with the power cracks you enough to become a Radiant, and he said it does, but apparently the spike scares off spren like Syl, though he directly implied that it would open you up to Odium's influence. So, if you are just already an Allomancer, then becoming a Savant is probably damaging enough to qualify for Radianthood. That is an off-topic paragraph though. I agree with this. +1 for Argent.

The major point you are ignoring here is that the Skybreakers may not have any Shards. They have Surgebinders in their midst, and therefor have spren that abhor them. We don't know enough about the organization of the Skybreakers to say whether there are enough people in the group that aren't proto-Skybreakers compared to live spren to make it reasonable for other members to own Shards. I will assume for the moment that you have read Edgedancer, and understand where I am coming from. It could be a large secret society, or it could just be the few proto-Radiants controlled by Nale. In the end your first point is directly contradicted by in book evidence. The Skybreakers do use Surgebinders, but we haven't the faintest how much. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but it's tough. I'll edit this if people think it is too spoilery. Your second point doesn't really make sense to me. If I was trying to bond a spren, then owning a Shardblade is the last thing I would want to do. The Skybreakers would know what Shardblades really are, so they certainly know the effect it would have on your bondability. If Dalinar hadn't had a Blade, maybe he would have become a Radiant sooner. I would get rid of it however is the most convenient and least likely to get in trouble with the regional government. Nale is not 'ends justify means' he is 'ends justify means that are at least tenuously within the law.' That point about Dalinar just made a new mini theory pop into my head. Owning a Blade opens you up to the influence of Odium more and that is why Blade owners experience the Thrill more.

This is a fair point, I have no direct counter evidence, but there isn't really any evidence for the idea either, so whatever. I do agree that their mother could have been from another organization or just plain crazy. For all we know, she was a fanatical Vorin believer and thought that Surgebinders are evil, so when she realized what her daughter was doing she tried to kill her. This is a possibility, but I feel like the obvious answer of her being a Skybreaker minion is more likely. It is a simpler answer and also accounts for her having a friend along to help kill Shallan. And to account for the legality of killing her, she probably rationalized that what Nale doesn't know, won't get you killed. Besides that, it would be embarrassing to admit to your organization that the exact thing you are hunting (that is extremely rare, mind) showed up in your family. That is the prevailing theory. I simply don't agree with it. I always disliked it, but accepted it due to the lack of an alternative. It just feels... contrived, and it doesn't really explain things well. Now I have crafted an alternative that fits the facts and makes sense on its own. Even if the explanation in the OP, in retrospect, was pretty shoddy.

You have made a solid post here, but there are a couple things you have misread. 1. This is fairly good. I would say it is off, but it would require lengthy posting to point out minor differences in my opinion, so I will leave it be. 2. You have misread this. Brandon is saying you have to both remove your Identity and tap some Connection. He absolutely does not imply removing your Identity changes your Connections. It likely does, but not in the ways you seem to think, and only minorly. 3. I have asked similar questions about breath, and he basically dodged the question and said that blanking the donator of a power's Identity is frequently enough to facilitate transfer, and blanking both donator and recipient almost always allows for transfer of various powers. 4. I would disagree with this as well. Spren self regulate very heavily. Citing is difficult on mobile, but the basic idea is that spren are picky and vary their pickyness wildly from type to type and possible from individual to individual. For my own thoughts on Identity, I would like to present a metaphor on serial numbers. Each person has a serial number that describes who they are. This number is large and acts like DNA. It describes some information about the person regarding who they are personality wise, some of their key Connections to various things, and a core, usually immutable, piece that just identifies them separate of other people. You can only access metalminds of other people if your Identity numbers match close enough to the numbers stamped on the metalmind, or more specifically, that they aren't too different. Blanking your Identity, then, is like scratching out the serial number of your soul. With fewer numbers to compare, there are fewer differences. This makes the metalmind (or other ability) accessible. Some differences are necessary to allow the attributes stored by a child tappable by their adult self.

I recently, because of this discussion, decided that I think of people's spiritwebs like windshields. If you have some high emotion, which is associated with Snapping, it is like a rock hitting the windshield. Some people don't really experience anything because of the snapping. The difference with Allomancers is that the windshield cracks in a certain location. Burning metals, then, is like applying pressure to the windshield. Normal pressure of burning doesn't really affect it much, unless done over an extended period of time. So someone like Wax burning often and a lot is like taking your thumb to the glass and forcing the crack to grow until it is complete, and then getting it repaired at the local shop so it can't expand any more than that (I have done this in that past, several years ago, and my windshield is just fine now). And someone like Spook is like taking a mallet to the windshield so that it really cracks up. There isn't a ton you can do to fix a windshield like that, so Harmony had to basically replace his. Harmony can totally patch up Wax's web, though, since the damage to it is less extensive. This also implies that the side effects of savant-hood of Wax's type are much less than those experienced by those of Spook's variety.