Lewis Nethur

I...would challenge that. There is far too much aluminum by mass in era 2 for it to not be getting refined on at least a small industrial scale. Buuut...just like in real life, if one were to identify a process for turning material that's worth less than dirt into a material even more valuable than gold by weight...one would be highly incentived to be secretive about it. Kandra, being the ultimate spies of the cosmere, would be unlikely to be unaware of such a process. Worldhoppers would be smarter to bring the process knowledge with them rather than drag literal carts of aluminum ingots across time and space between worlds...

I don't think that Odium can harm himself as part of the contest anymore. He's the rightful ruler of all of Kharbranth after all. he would have to make someone else kill him for him.

@Isilel - Scadrial has electricity now. Aluminum is one of the easiest materials to purify, the process is just being hidden and withheld from the general population. The lord ruler did the exact same thing with the metals that he didn't want other people to have. Kandra could reasonably be aware of it though.

Edit: deleted to avoid a rewrite.

Very interesting, I forget sometimes how diverse scadrial is (and always has been, to be honest). My best guess, based on only what we've heard as pure rumor and intuition, would be that they're simply an isolated tribe of rebel Kandra who didn't want to take orders from their elders or Harmony anymore at some point and just wear exoskeletons (exosuits?) instead of regular skeletons in order to shield themselves from external influence and control. My basis: 1. Nicki has been proven reliable before. 2. Kandra are functionally immortal and have had internal political strife and division before. 3. The only hemalurgic constructs that we've seen so far that were complicated enough to be considered unique species were created with the full working knowledge and power of a Shard. It's strongly implied that the Lord Ruler continued trying to make new monsters for 1000 years after his ascent and never managed to be successful in figuring out how to make anything other than inquisitors, several breeds of kandra, and koloss. 4. Most kandra seem to be aware and resentful of the fact that they can be mind-controlled. Many have committed suicide over it even, so I think it stands to reason that some would evolve who would be clever enough to shield their brains properly. 5. Immortal goo-creatures walking around in suits of heavy plate mail would probably seriously freak most people out and encourage questions. Questions which would inevitably lead to the goo-creatures weakness for exploitation by the metalborn. It stands to reason that they would self isolate if they existed. 6. Crab people are real irl, so why not kandra with exoskeletons?

This is a take that I can like. Ranette, the luncher who hangs with smokers, appears to unambiguously be the best design engineer of era 2 by a country mile. Can anyone reproduce or mass produce her designs? No...it doesn't seem like it. So I assume her time to shine is fundamentally very limited. Still though. Lurchers are extremely powerful; there are a lot of objects smaller than a person that can be telekinetically manipulated, and pulling can be radically more efficient than shoving if you have a light and smooth enough touch.

This actually would make a lot of sense. Syl and kaladin were soulbonded for years without either having any meaningful awareness of that fact and stifled from progressing because the circumstances of Kal's life essentially prohibited him from reaching the first oath. So too would Szeth's (if he was proto-bonded) given that he was tormented, enraged, and hopeless to his core that he would ever see truth again...this is extremely astute in my opinion, well done.

I can't vote on a false dichotomy in good conscience... They're both absurdly powerful in their own right, and better together than apart. That said, steel can repel bullets from unseen enemies spherically and reliably when burned continuously. Iron can only deflect bullets from forward and backward facing enemies with loose statistical probability if one commits to wearing tens of pounds of armor at all times. (Armor that will VERY rapidly become exhausted and unreliable after even a single impact!!!) Losing control when steel pushing and being rocketed haphazardly in a random direction is rarely fatal so long as one has at least a single penny in their pocket. Losing control when iron pulling is basically always fatal via gaping open chest wound... Killing a person covertly with steel pushing is far easier and less revealing of the exact attack vector than iron pulling, and requires far less preparation and coordination. (Iron would require a weapon of attack to be meticulously and perfectly placed in advance, and would immediately reveal the attackers location; steel could kill with a paperclip who's direction of attack would only be loosely discernable in the heat of the moment. Steel and iron are both stupidly cheap and easy to produce in massive volume. Steel allows one to fly. Iron does not.

Due to the complexity and rarity of the subject coming up on-screen, I think it's reasonable to assume at this point that resonance functions will only ever be cannonized when their disclosure is 100% necessary for a character's arc and development. When theorizing about resonance, my understanding is that it's important to bear in mind how wave functions stack and superimpose upon eachother in real life on basic mathematical principle. For example, consider the nested function: y=sin(x*cos(x)). Relative to the function, y=sin(x), you end up with a wavy-wave with an irregular period that periodically spikes dramatically here and there. That's interesting! And also easy enough to understand that a person affected by it could make enough sense of it to leverage (metaphorically!!) If you nest TOO many functions, then you end up with absolute chaos, a soul that cannot leverage the natural interactions of it's component parts because there are too many of them rattling and shaking together to make rational independent sense of (lines going all over the place, lots of imaginary components, crazy asymptotic spikes, ect.). Such a soul is ridiculously powerful in and of itself though, so this isn't considered a handicap (the lord ruler is implied to have had this going on in his heart...). If you have periodically similar/compatible Overlaid functions playing together in small quantities, then you can produce some very exotic and powerful waves with spikes that are predictable, large, and interesting without being asymptotic, purely imaginary, or hyper-chaotic. Hopefully this helps and I didn't strain the metaphor too far on this one! Edit: EXTREMELY unfortunate auto-correct replacements that had to be manually fixed. Oh dear lord. Sorry to anyone who saw.

Dang. Well...Whatever. If they tax innate power from the metalborn, then I guarantee that they'll tax strength, intelligence, and every other earned attribute possessed by the non-metalborn. That's...the way it goes...

Yeah, that's essentially all I was getting at: wax is implied to be superpowered by the mists a couple times when he makes some of his most incredible feats. I probably should've chosen my words more precisely; sorry for any miscommunication from my side! I think yall have got it though

Absolutely! Dead blades want to be bonded, they facilitate it themselves and make no prohibitions regarding the identity of the recipient. You could have a single wielder bond every blade on Roshar and summon and throw them like ninja stars with every beat of the heart if you wanted to; it would just require more money than even God has to make actually happen.

Holy hell...yeah, any twin-born who was friends with (or themselves) a master of forgery should absolutely be able to craft a full functional reproduction of the bands of mourning. That makes perfect sense. Filling them would be kind of tedious and expensive still, but they could totally just walk around as their favorite type of compounder and have the other 30 powers sitting on reserve in high quantity. It's not nearly as good as Lord-Ruler-hood, or Godking-hood, but it's the next best thing!

Lol. I think you just created state-mandated hemalurgic taxes you monster!

If I remember the annotations and WoBs correctly offhand, it's generally implied that, due to having his spiked earing in at the time, he theoretically may have been indulging in performance-enhancing allomantic supercharging by way of the mists during that scene. (Which technically means Harmony may have been microdosing pure atium into his soul without his specific consent or awareness). I still count it, but I think Wax deserves an asterisk for being a known agent of a God.

Yeah, I can't explain the sand part; I assume Sanderson must have just felt it was more thematically appropriate than a beach of bedrock and clay for a scene following a shipwreck. Those types of anomalies are difficult to identify, so good on you if no one comes up with a rock solid explanation. I think @alder24 nailed it with the sun being the main source of the tides though. Thinking on it more, Roshar is smaller and spins faster than the Earth, so...if their sun happens to be a little larger or denser than the Earth's, then they could plausibly have tides similar to ours.

Something else to consider with double time bubbles is that any bullet shot at the operator would be wildly deflected not just once, but twice! Statistically speaking, it might be effectively impossible to ever land a hit on someone standing in the center of a double-bubble even if you sprayed them with a machine gun. I would have to find and crack open my old quantum physics notes to be sure but, off the cuff, I'm pretty sure that, even in Scadrial's distant future, laser or plasma weapons should essentially be rendered ineffective too due to how the momentum of photons gets transformed when passing through their edges. And a double-bubble savant could walk around while being even more bullet-proof than Wax! It would just cost a lot.

It hasn't happened on-screen yet, but the foundations for chaining together nicrobursts to supercharge a single misting (or more realistically, a mechanical allomantic construct) are all there and should work in principle. Each person in the chain would need to swallow geometrically larger amounts of metal than the previous person for the process to make sense though, so there should be an upper-limit on how much power could be forced through someone in a single burst. It might theoretically be possible make some of powers behave in extremely peculiar ways if someone was insane enough to burn an entire stomach full of metal in a single one-shot burst.

Omg. Yes! The cosmere absolutely deserves KFC. If the first storefront isn't run by a white-hatted koloss-blooded tin-feruchemist I'll cry though.

Oh! I love when this proposal comes up! Yeah, if we still get a mistborn serial killer series eventually, I assume freezing and stabbing victims, then rocketing away at supersonic speed, is going to be one of their favorite tricks. lol Honestly, I don't expect that they would even need to be particularly gifted or skilled in order to pull this off; simply possessing both powers is the real hurdle in my eyes, and...it's only a matter of time before people understand how to make artificial mistborn. The breeding programs and bloodline concentration initiatives are completely disgusting and doomed to fail in my opinion, but...hacking Connection to Harmony or distilling pure Lerasium? That sort of stuff could work and be very difficult for Harmony to stop once it's written down and disseminated.

This legitimately made me smile Word!

Hmmmm...I haven't reread that part in a while but your nitpicking does sound valid...is it reasonably possible that 'high tide' in this context would simply refer to a state in which the sand is fully and completely submerged by water and the tidal forces causing such a state could be derived by the pressure and momentum of each highstorm front? As in: the sand is protected from permanent removal because encroaching storms are the very thing pushing the tide above the level required for storms to sweep them away in a single day? I'm thinking that rosharans might treat 'tides' similarly to how they treat seasons: transient unpredictable weather states that are driven by distinctly different forces than the earth environment readers would typically intuit independently.

Thanks! And...Yeaaahhh...I couldn't come up with a reference that confirmed that the highstorms keep restoring investiture after passing the west coast (honestly still unsure on this point), so I tried to take the most absolute and confirmed approach i could imagine. That might work fine and easily though in one-third the time and with way fewer resources to boot. A vehicle is a very intelligent idea. My thought was to go as totally minimalist as possible though, like...solo operator, no state or military resource requisition rights beyond what they can personally utilize and control, no supporting team after setup and launch, and no experimental technology, just raw leveraging of what is already 100% confirmed and reliably possible from the perspective of the characters on screen. I've been awake for 60 hours straight before (albeit, not under literal life-threatening stress...) with zero investiture, so I feel relatively confident regarding proof of concept on that front. I'm struggling to recall if we have any examples of a Radiant remaining powered on on-screen for 30+ hours straight though. And I'm not familiar enough with existing WoBs to know if readers have had it confirmed one way or the other whether stormlight functions similarly to allomantic Pewter in terms of staving off fatigue (dampening the effects, even for days at a time, but not actually healing them). I'm hoping folks can help me cover those uncertainties for us to be able to say, "yes, absolutely, just about any skybreaker or windrunner could hit up the origin with a little math and patience for the storms to line up right." I'm assuming that, on account of the war, no one who has fully earned their plate would be allowed to take the risk and sheer amount of time away from the battlefront to answer such an esoteric curiosity. A single first or second-oath skybreaker or windrunner though? Well...There are enough of them for this to be a mission that I would approve financing for in any of their officers' shoes.

So...I just want people to know what's actually at the origin. To that end, I was trying to imagine an easy way for someone to get there without taking substantial personal risk to be able to report back and be believed when they explain how they did it. Soooo...could any skybreaker ride the front of the everstorm to get there today with what we already know? My thought: the everstorm seems to travel at about 120 miles per hour, taking approximately 9 Rosharan days to circle the globe. That means, worst case, it would take approximately 4.5 days for it to get from the center of the continent to the origin. That's about 3 days from the east coast to the origin (worst case). It could (if timed decently) reasonably cross paths with a highstorm twice in that time if my geometry is on today. That's about 60 hours of travel and being awake needed for someone riding the storm. My proposal: a skybreaker flies up high loaded with gems, then reduces down to a half lashing vertically, making them weightless while draining as little Investiture as reasonably possible, then throws open a parachute in front of the everstorm and uses as little investiture as possible to stay aloft (and heal from lightning burns and exhaustion...) using the two highstorm crossings to recharge, spaced at about 30 hour intervals; lets say they happen at hours 15 and 45. Again, I'm talking about loading up a backpack with as many gemstones as a surgebinder can reasonably carry and just soaring to the origin on faith and back-of-the-envelope math alone. Is this insane? Is there another easy way to just get there so everyone can be certain finally? Could it work if someone really committed to it? Please don't tell me we just have to wait for wait for Elsecallers with more control over transportation to evolve in order to get a straight answer

A-bendalloy to speed up time And....(wait for it!) F-Chromium to store fortune inside a protective bubble! Storing fortune seems crazy dangerous in general. Buuuut...if one is inside a bubble that basically severs them from reality and accelerates them to 100x speed while storing 99% (call it 100% to make the math easier to follow) of their spiritual Fortune...then one could store 100 continuous minutes of 200% fortune in only 1 minute of actual time passing outside their protective shell. Wanna tap more than 200%? Well you maniac, that equates to (only roughly approximately) 20 minutes of 1000% fortune per day with only needing to burn bendalloy for 1 minute per day. That's literally insane. Wanna be more conservative and keep a low profile? (Hyper-Extreme super luck is probably bound to upset the authorities if you use it daily after all...) well...burn bendalloy and store fortune aggressively for 1 minute when you first wake up, then tap fortune for the next 8 hours at 1.25x strength. Congratulations, everything you do or say every day is now mystically weighted heavily in your favor, but (probably? Idk...) not heavily enough to trigger major red flags. Bear in mind, this would absolutely ruin your daily sleep schedule, and shorten your life. Still pretty neat though.