Djarskublar

That is a fair point on the kinetic energy. Where would it go? Heat? Some sort of kinetic force that squishes you? PAFO I guess... @PeterAhlstrom

Ahh, thanks for the Surge. The not-parachute is actually a mass tap/store, not a speed store. The way it would work is somewhat shown with Wax. When he makes himself lighter while flying, he starts going faster. If you make yourself really light, then jump out of a plane, you will hit whatever terminal velocity you get on whatever planet you are on, then just before you hit the ground, start a sizeable tap, and you will slow down a lot. Enough that you could very easily survive the fall. Your momentum is conserved, so when you add mass, your velocity acts inversely, and you slow down. The only thing that would matter here is how fast you can switch from a sizeable store to a sizeable tap. Any number of examples in book would suggest it is as fast as you want.

@Peng the Just and I were hanging out today, and we decided to do some math and see if a full Feruchemist could do some freaky things. And they totally can. By far the most important metal for this is iron. The conservation of momentum that we see with Wax is very important. I told him about people's idea of using Feruchemical steel and the frictionlessness surge that Lift uses (whatever it is named...). We then were joking around about that, and we came to a question: could a feruchemist jump out of orbit? The short answer is yes, but it would likely kill them and require a solid store to tap out. Here is the setup: you fill a bunch of power of a few metals into your relevant minds. If you want to survive it, you will need gold, cadmium, and maybe pewter. If you don't mind dying in the process, you only need a bunch of iron and steel. Some pewter doesn't hurt either. The mechanic for how you do this is to tap some speed and a lot of weight. You need to maintain the speed tap for a long time until you leave atmo, so you can't do a very powerful tap unless you are willing to use a spike and become a compounder (totally worth it). Tap some strength too and set it up so you run out in around a quarter second. The instant your feet leave the ground, stop tapping iron and start filling it instead. You still need to tap steel for speed, but that remains constant. If you tap strength to give yourself a more powerful jump, then great. You don't need to do anything with it now. This works out so that you can get a jump that from iron alone ends up at a huge factor. Tap out for a quarter second everything you've got, and you could probably hit 20x mass for that time fairly easily. Then you store around 3/4 of your mass, and you have a factor of 80. A normal human can jump around a meter high if they are in excellent condition. Say a solid pewter tap allows a jump three times that. That works out to a velocity of around 7.7 m/s when you leave the ground. Toss in a factor of four on your speed tap for the duration of the ascent, and you get an initial velocity of around 2500 m/s. The friction would clearly burn you up very fast, so have your friendly neighborhood Edgedancer apply some awesomeness if that is a thing they can do, or spike your friend if not. If you don't need to be intact when you are going up, that should be a high enough initial velocity to get you to space on Earth. It's only around 30 km to the edge of space. This only gets you to space, though. Escape velocity is going to be somewhere around 12,000 m/s, so you would need to store for a ridiculously long time or be a compounder via Hemalurgy to pull off escape velocity. You can use a smaller version of this to jump up buildings easily. Physics! (it's been a while, so feel free to poke holes) Another interesting thing you can do with Feruchemical iron is jump off buildings without a care. Start storing a lot of mass when you jump, and just before you hit the ground start a solid tap. You can use that to decelerate to a manageable speed, and survive any fall. What are parachutes you ask? Irrelevant, I say! While I'm at it, I open this up to you! Come up with fantastic uses for Feruchemical iron that involve conservation of momentum.

I put a couple days of though into your point, spool, and I don't think it necessarily matters. Kandra do have blood as I recall. On the other hand, I would bet you can use spikes on lifeless that don't have any blood in their bodies anymore. They have stagnant ichor alcohol in them. I would also bet you can use spikes on, say, a tree. Those don't have blood, they have sap. I could agree with an argument that having bloodflow makes it so you are more efficient with the use of the Hemalurgic ability, but I don't think it is always a requirement. And by more efficient here I mean that you would be able to fully access the spirit attached to the spike. I could see the requirement just being some sort of flow, so sap or ichor alcohol would work, but not necessarily as well as if they were flowing more freely. Perhaps the electron sea on a metal would count. I got nothing for what would flow with awakened stone, though. Speaking of using spikes on trees, does that mean you could create the Cthaeh from the Kingkiller Chronicles? That would be really trippy.

I guess I will chime in with a couple ideas for what we could call the bonus powers. Submanifestations comes to mind. That sounds like the best option, though it is lengthy. Interactive manifestations might work, but is too vague imo. Perks honestly isn't a bad term. And spool, you have a fair chance of being right with that one. Another potential and similar explanation is that the cracks themselves interact in some manner, and once you get enough of them so that you are 'covered' in cracks, there aren't any interactions anymore because there is no space between the cracks to interact in.

When someone tells you they are bored, say 'hi board, I'm nail!' and then poke them. Great laughs ensue.

I don't think it would influence it either way. It could be argued both ways. I would say that they can morph their form, and shift the point of mass on their body that holds the nexus. I can see other arguments holding weight though.

Ugh, the main problem with this whole thread is that we are all making assumptions without the requisite facts. I may even be 'errorgant' by posting this next bit, but this is also something I think needs to be discussed. I think I can make a case for type IV entities having bind points. We don't know exactly how they work or really much about them at all except that a human has 200-300 and that they are very specific in location. This means I am free to make reasonable speculation on how they work. While considering if a type IV would have bind points, I first considered why humans do, and why powers that don't even necessarily exist yet could probably be spiked. Say a Shard Invested on Scadrial that hasn't been there yet, we can now expect a new set of powers. I would also expect for there to be new bind points that can be used to spike off those powers. The only question is whether they would naturally form, or if Ruin would have to modify the power. Considering that Hemalurgy is important to the Cosmere at large, this suggests to me that the bind points are actually independent of Ruin. That conclusion led me to believe that bind points are spots on your physical form where your spiritweb is better 'connected' to your physical form. Things that don't have enough of a soul to require a nexus like that wouldn't have any bind points, but a powerful soul would have many. Therefor, lumps of inanimate matter wouldn't have them, but things with true souls would. This matters with things like Surgebinders, because they didn't have a bind point for their spren bond before, but once it is formed, a 'nexus' on their soul would appear that Hemalurgy can access. When you spike someone, it rips off the soul that is relevant to the nexus, so it would steal an ability or trait corresponding with that nexus. Something like an awakened object would not have bind points, though. The bind point would actually be attached to the awakener, since the Breath is theirs. This bind point would only grant control of the awakened object. You can't normally spike Breath since it is only loosely attached to your soul, so it doesn't form a nexus on the soul. But with a Lifeless or a type IV, the Breath is no longer attached to the soul of the Awakener. It is actually on the object. The object would then likely have a bind point for whatever stuff it is doing. Those Breaths are likely better attached, so a nexus may form. The deciding factor on whether NB has bind points, then, is whether or not the Breath is actually part of the object, or if it is still only loosely attached. Considering that it is sentient, I lean towards a more firm attachment. In the end, this didn't prove anything, but it makes a ton of sense for why Hemalurgy works the way it does. This certainly bears discussion, and I am very interested to see if any of you think it has merit. Sorry if you think this should be its own thread, but it makes sense here with the topic at hand.

I have to say that I completely disagree that becoming an Elantrian would be at all limiting or useless to Hoid. If he can work it out so he can access the abilities off Sel, then it would be ridiculously useful. I think that if he managed to become an Elantrian, he would attempt to bring Khriss in on experimenting with it, if only because she would be very helpful and make the process faster. Even without her help, though, I'm certain that he could get the magic to work off world. Even if he couldn't, it would still be really powerful. Engraving Aons or stitching them into clothing would be truly amazing. He doesn't have true hard age immortality yet as far as we know, he just has some age back for super longevity. Being an Elantrian would solve the issue of him potentially aging to death later. The thing about Elantrians is their sheer versatility. If they can think of a desired effect and use the right Aon, they can do anything. This gets pretty freaking strong since there is probably a way to further rewrite spiritwebs with Aons. Hoid would definitely do that. If he became an Elantrian, I can't imagine he would do anything other than practice Aons until the next book plot came up. Aons can do anything. They can't do it immediately because you have to draw it, but that means you just have to prepare in advance, which Hoid is excellent at. Aons, to me anyway, are the best way to enchant an object. Once you figure out how to access the Dor off Sel, you can add that functionality to any item, and it gets OP really fast. Basically, you could make Aonic shardplate. And a Shardblade. And a 'magic wand' type thing. You could literally make a wand that when flicked properly, it would shoot a fireball. We even know the base Aon that would do that. You could shoot bolts of pure damaging Investiture - wand of magic missiles. If it's a wand or staff in D&D, you can probably make something similar with Aons. You could animate golems or create better versions of Nightblood. Basically, Aons are the most similar to straight spellcasting we have seen. It is easily the most powerful system for the talented mind and hand. You just have to find a way around its base limitation of geography.

Mistborn, Stormlight, and Reckoners minor spoilers.

If you aren't sure of it, you could make it look for the string from the end of the URL backwards, and if it doesn't find it within a certain number of characters, just stops looking. There has to be a limit to how large the comment can be, so just look back as far as necessary. You can also add in qualifiers to make sure that it only executes if there are certain character types after the #comment. Overall, it should be an easy fix even if the .hash doesn't work the way you presented it as working. It is simple string conversion, right? I don't know javascript well enough to say, and I really don't know enough about how URLs work, but the coder in me says this should be easy.

I can't find WoB for it right now, but I thought that anyone could hold Breath and reach Heightenings, but there was special sDNA that allowed you to awaken and Return. So everyone on Nathis can awaken. That would have been better for him to have said, I think. Also, if type IVs have bindpoints, does that mean that you could spike off their abilities? Craft a type IV with useful powers, and then spike them off for yourself bwahahahaha

Oh, I know that awakened objects eventually wind down, but it takes a long time. Long enough that people on Nalthis probably don't know much about how long it takes. I am just excited to see the implications of awakened machinery once they hit an industrial revolution. Those will run down eventually too. I was talking about timelines for a surgebound Breath. It may be consumed faster since it isn't used as intended by the original manufacturer. It may be consumed faster because surgebinding is more power intense (no way to easily tell on that count). It may be consumed faster because of people thinking that surgebindings just don't last as long. There may be that sort of cognitive effect on how long it lasts, who knows. If I was from Nalthis, I would start a dictatorship that required all citizens to give me their Breath so that I can be a god king. Screw two to four a week like Susebron gets, just give it to me as soon as you are old enough to visualize and vocalize the Command. If it was a large enough domain, we could find out if there are more Heightenings! All in the name of research, amiright?

This is the truth nastiest rumor I have seen. Don't post things that will scare off the prey new blood!

That Connection idea is interesting. I would actually be more interested in surgebinding with Breaths, though. Making your bindings stick for a very long time sounds incredibly useful. Like the object that permanently has not friction on it. Or an object that permanently is in zero-g. And with what @The One Who Connects quoted, how fast would the Breath drain from a surgebound object? The thing about surgebinding is that it uses Stormlight, so it doesn't stick, but a Breath should. Would it still consume a Breath pretty fast like a Returned?

I would normally totally agree with your points on the first method, but I indirectly addressed this without realizing it when I expanded the method. I would have the gold/gold Twinborn have a spike that allows them to awaken. Then you spike off their attributes and have them tap a bunch of health to heal it off and regrow themselves. You then break the spike to reduce the Investiture so it doesn't interfere. As an aside, I would bet that there is some threshold where it wouldn't interfere too much while still doing something. These spikes are from the Twinborn, and therefor have his/her Identity. Then when they awaken the object, they can try to imprint as much of their identity on it as possible, and that should make it able to access the spikes. For the actual construction of the object, I have an important question I haven't seen posed before. What if the object you are awakening is only partially metal? I realized that if type IVs do have Hemalurgic bind points, then driving spikes into something metal would be impractical. You would still want at least part of the object to be metal, assuming you want a weapon. Personally, I would make a naginata. For any of you who don't know what that is, it is, to put it simply, a sword blade on the end of a polearm. The haft would be much easier to spike than the blade. How would it being partially metal affect it, though? Would you just awaken the wood, and attach a blade? It would certainly be a LOT cheaper, though not as useful. Just leave metal out of it entirely at that point. If you awaken the whole item, though, would you still need to be at the ninth Heightening to be able to awaken it? A lower one since you aren't just awakening metal? Would you even run into the same problem NB has with not understanding humanity well if you don't use metal? Basically, I just had the most overpowered idea of all time. Tape medallions (read: BoM) to your type IV. Specifically, make them a nicrosil compounder. This would get you around the issue of it needing to eat your Investiture to operate. Another thing that would support it being useful is to not make it able to cut on all three Realms. One or two is plenty. That would drastically reduce its need to eat Investiture. While you are at it, make the Bands that you tape to it have windrunner abilities too so that the object can have some hardcore mobility. While we are fantasizing about stuff that may not be possible, lets jack the power level up some. Use both methods on the same object. Whatever sweet effects we can stack on this thing can only make it better! Use the Hemalurgy to make it understand humanity better, then awaken it with DB to make it more powerful period. Then use medallions and/or more Hemalurgy to make the object have more range of ability. Also, have an Elantrian carve Aons on it to make it way better as well. Maybe attach some fabrial(s) to it if there are any good ones for this, maybe an alerter? Basically, if it has an application that could make it better, use it. I think that is all of the useful stuff you could actually use on the object. It isn't like you can teach a sword the ChayShan arts, after all. Also, what would burning gold do with an object like this? Not a super important question, but still interesting. Dunno...

The half answer is that they will touch their forehead to feel for paint. You did say everyone was painted after all, and they aren't communicating with each other, just... scratching an itch. You didn't mention the possibility of orange paint. Real answer: The first night nobody will leave. They can't be sure they aren't that one guy who isn't blue. Then the next night they will realize that since nobody left, and everyone they see has paint, they must as well. They will all leave at this point. That doesn't hold up under scrutiny, but is the best I can do. Or wait, they would pair off. It is easy in pairs. If you see the other guy is blue, you don't go. When you see the other guy didn't leave, you know you are blue, and everyone leaves. I got nothing on the pink blue brown one. I have a feeling the brown will be fecal matter. And another riddle for everyone that is truly tough, but not impossible: Ten men are to be executed. The executioner tells them they will be let go if they can guess if a hat he places on their head is red or black. There is no set ratio of black to red. When guessing, they are placed in a line that makes it so they are in a marching order. The person in back can see the others, and the person in front can see nobody. The only communication possible is the statement of red or black. They are allowed to plan and talk together before having the hats placed. How do you maximize the number of survivors?

I think you have brought together all of the feedback given to make an excellent decision... in advance. Still dunno how it will turn out, of course. Best of luck.

WoR was generally just... incredible. NB showing up is easily the best bombshell ever dropped in any medium I have seen. Only a little foreshadowing if you were paying really close attention and noticed Vasher, but it will probably be extremely relevant to future plot. On top of that, it is the most interesting setup for the apocalypse I have read. People saw it coming and have dealt with it before, that isn't common, and what makes it even more rare and interesting is that there is a real chance they won't successfully deal with it. Plus, Brandon's worldbuilding for Stormlight is easily his best, and that is saying something. The characterization, while arguably not the absolute best, is still excellent. Then the disadvantaged duel was really, REALLY cool. Adolin was a boss, and Kaladin jump kicked a guy in Plate hard enough to crack it... lolz for dayz. This is truly epic fantasy, in every wonderful sense of the word.

I was sad Ym died as well, but I have to sheepishly admit it was mostly because I was like 'oh no! One less Radiant to fight the voidbringers!' (read: one less Surgebinder for us to study ;))

I had already seen this and just assumed it was something lots of people had seen. I took it as evidence that it really was Vasher. I guess it wasn't as commonly caught as I thought. Good job on catching it yourself. I usually suck at that. I didn't even notice it was NB in WoR until a second read through... *facepalm* I was just like... huh that's a weird sharblade, I don't care though cuz SZETH!

Actually, you can use Nightblood or a shardblade as a spike, the spiked Investiture just doesn't stick to them since they are already so Investiture dense. There is WoB about this, but I have to get ready for work soon, and I don't want to get stuck in Theoryland looking for it. Think of it like a metalmind, you can't fill a metalmind past a certain point, and sharblades and NB meet that point, or are very close to it.

One suggestion that you should take with more than a pinch of salt: initiate a situation where you would feel comfortable severing ties. If you want to sever ties, then you could sneakily do something to provoke them, then call them on it and sever ties. I will not say this is the best solution, or even a good one, but it is an option. I have done similar things with my family, just not so... drastically.

I can accept all those points, @Argent. I don't fully agree with them, but I do accept them as a valid view. The goal is to make the object have a better ability to understand vague human concepts. NB does have a rudimentary value system, so I thought maybe adding some human spikes to its construction might make it more intelligent in that regard. On using Divine Breath, I would say two possibilities exist. This is about the core mechanic of how something is awakened. When you awaken something, does it grab a breath at a time really fast until it has the amount of Investiture necessary? Does it automatically grab the amount it needs? How does it choose which Breaths to use? Most recently aquired first? Pure chance? If it chooses one at a time from most recent first, you could seriously hack it with a Divine Breath. If you know the awakening is going to take about 800 Breaths, then you can shuffle around any Breaths you have so that the Divine one is near the 'bottom.' Then when you awaken the object, it gets, say, 750 normal Breaths, and then suddenly it is massively overfilled by a Divine Breath. If it takes a big dollop all at once you just have to make sure you have few enough normal Breaths that you become a drab after awakening the item. If you take the above example, you would need to manage it so you only had 750 Of whatever stockpile, plus the DB. It may just take the DB when awakened and leave you with 750, but it may take the 750 and then the DB. Regardless of how it is chosen, if you get the DB in the awakening, your object is probably overfilled. Ignoring any special properties of DBs for a moment, that would probably help with NB's problem of being unable to maintain both power and intelligence. Even if you awakened NB with only a DB, it would still have around double the Investiture. Then we have to decide what, if any, special properties DBs would have or apply to an awakening like this. I don't know that there would be any. A DB may just be a super strong Breath. That would be boring, though, and I don't think it is necessarily the most likely scenario. I think there may be some more stuff that would go on with them. Children of Returned have special bonus abilities, at least sometimes. If it was just powerful, then we could expect a Royal Locks like ability from anyone that is descended from someone with around 2000 breaths. While rare, those people aren't unheard of, so I would say there is at least something special involved in the process of Returned having children, and more likely just with DB in general. I don't have anything concrete on what the bonus effects of awakening something with DB would be, but I think it is safe to say that there would be something. At a guess, I would say DB would be better at interpreting the Intent of commands. There my be an increased Connection to Endowment, though I don't know what that would entail for an awakened object. The object in question may be straight up more powerful. I don't recall if DB is the solid or gaseous manifestation of Endowment, but either way, it may provide a direct connection to its power. That would be extremely useful to the point where it would be pointless to make a type IV that didn't have a DB involved. If Endowment started powering the item directly because of DB, it probably wouldn't corrupt the Investiture used or drain much, if any, Investiture from the user. That is all guesswork, though. I feel it is pretty safe to say DB would do something extra when awakening something to sentience, but that there isn't a lot of evidence for any specific effect. I suppose we should also address the question of whether it is even possible to use DB in awakening. A Returned may only be able to use the DB for the my life to yours Command. I have seen it theorized that the DB is consumed for the healing process when given to someone. If both of those cases are true, then awakening with DB may be impossible. You might be able to get away with Hemalurgically stealing one though. Actually, come to think of it, that would be a relatively accurate way to test how much power is lost from spiking. You could just lifesense how much power was lost from the Breath. I think that covers everything I wanted to mention.

Why, @The Invested Beard of course! I can't figure this one, and I don't know any more riddles, so I'll pass on a real answer.