Lewis Nethur

Actually, since highstorms hit every 3ish days on average, that might be exactly enough time for Dalinars visions to have started immediately after that potter's death. Btw, you're right on the dates according to the sources i could find on my own.

Simultaneously hilarious, and terrifying, have an upvote. I feel like hemalurgy could potentially be used to fuse living tissue and mechanical components ala moving around, reshaping, and adapting the internal organs and nerves. I'm thinking artificial limbs and terminator style human-robot hybrids, but with much less need for advanced technology and super-computing. Basically circumventing the impossibly difficult engineering problem of interfacing brains to machines by using strategically placed spikes to staple things together. Control them with nicrobursts and rioters/soothers and invade non-metallic art possessing worlds. Sixth of Dusk sequel anyone?

I don't think it's just about the story being bleak. @CaptainRyan raised some really good points. Harmony's direct involvement was problematic for believably purposes; he wanted Bleeder eliminated as a force against him, but he wasn't really willing to commit any resources to the task. He could've enlisted Marsh's help as soon as Bleeder went rouge, months before the story began, and ended everything without much of a struggle or loss of life.

I believe age could be a huge factor for some of the orders, and much less of a factor for others. I'd imagine that new Bondsmiths are typically selected after they are well into adulthood, as this order seems to prioritize a certain maturity, honor, social position, and sense of duty that is rare in children, teens, and young adults. I'm not saying a 5 year-old couldn't ever become a bondsmith if they truly exhibited the characteristics, just that it would be extremely rare (bordering on impossible) for such a child to exist and be in a position where a spren would choose to bond with them over candidates who are, for example, already in respected positions of military/civil leadership. I think there's a certain practicality and pragmatism in how most spren choose who to bond, exhibited by how many Kholins have been scouted for Radianthood; they're in positions of power in society, they all know each other, and they're fairly loyal to one another. This gives them an advantage right off the bat for attracting a spren compared to darkeyed farmers in unnamed villages, who would probably have to be tremendously more valiant and honorable to have comparable odds of attracting a spren's attention. Shallan's family's connections to the Ghostbloods may have influenced why she was chosen to begin with; as to why she was chosen at such a young age, I suspect that the cryptics either wanted time to cultivate her, or she was simply the most appealing candidate with the ties and position they wanted for their agent (most of her family is sorta nuts, so it would've been slim pickings). I suspect that most of the orders would normally exhibit some level of gender, nationality, socioeconomic, and age based discriminatory behaviors in their selection of new candidates because of their natural biases, at least until the orders were well-established and populated, at which point the spren could put more emphasis on finding candidates of strong moral fiber and the right personality who can be trained/cultivated, and less emphasis on finding candidates who are already in positions of power and already possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities to make a competent Radiant. Basically, there would probably be huge hiring biases immediately before/after a desolation, and (at least before the Recreance) the orders would gradually become more diverse as time went on.

If they don't, we'll splice them with alligators; those things go wild for chicken.

Didn't one guy get a wagon full of linens/carpets for his boon? I suppose he could've been lying, but my instinct is that the old magic is pretty flexible in its possible boons. At least compared to feruchemy and hemalurgy. You're right to point out that there does appear to be some overlap in their capabilities though, which Im inclined to attribute to their underlying realmatics.

First, props on thinking demonstrably faster than me with your post. Second, I've come to realize all feruchemy can be end-positive from a strictly energy and human potential perspective. It's an ability normal humans dont possess, and is therefore fundamentally exploitable for extreme personal gain. One of Rasheks followers throws a boulder that was blocking their expedition to the well of ascension by storing strength for a relatively short interval, a feat someone else probably couldn't have duplicated with weeks of time and a pickaxe. The only thing end-neutral about feruchemy is that Investiture is not normally gained or lost on average. Other gains/losses are possible and fair game since, you know, it's a magic system that exists to benefit the user. I appreciate the compliment, but I think I was probably being overly pedantic.

Exactly! For an immortal godlike space-wizard, I assume the humdrum of standard scientific investigation, raising a family, and building positive relationships, would eventually get maddeningly boring, despite the many obvious and recognizable charms. This is why SimCity had a "create disaster" button. Someday, somewhere, someone in the Cosmere will achieve immortality and knowledge of hemalurgy and crippling boredom, and their natural curiosity will eventually lead them to some dark places. It might take a long time, but someone will create my gosh darn army of flying bear-rats.

Why thank you. I'm surprised no one raised the objection that spiking one million bears might requiring extincting them entirely on a planet, which would be really sad. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe that would be roughly all the bears on Earth...granted, there used to be a lot more, and they used to be a lot bigger...if you think I'm mistaken feel free to fact check this, zoology was never my strongest subject. That said, for an immortal with access to many planets, it wouldn't be a crazy feat, just time consuming

@Calderis , @Extesian , I actually disagree with you on the shape issue. The way Investiture flows through and gets distributed in a metalmind or spike is, in many ways, similar to how electric charge gets distributed in a conductive solid. I believe that the scenes at the end of BoM where Alik uses a piece of etmetal to power what appear to be electric lights highlights this relationship best; meaning, it is the easiest to grasp without delving into electrodynamics. This could be coincidental, but my understanding of Sandersons style leads me to believe it is at least slightly deeper than that. Basically, I believe that spherical metalminds should be able to hold charge more efficiently than very thin metalminds of equal mass and volume. This is because as Investiture gets poured into the metalmind, the thing that makes the metalmind "full" is a gradually building resistance caused by the reduction in degrees of freedom in movement of the Investiture already present. Like how blowing more air molecules into a balloon makes it gradually harder to blow up. If a metalmind was so thin as to be nearly 2 dimensional, all of the Investiture stored in it would lack an entire degree of freedom right off the bat; I won't bore readers with the math, but this would be a massive detriment to storage of any type of charge or digital information. An alternative analogy would be solid state memory; 3d circuit boards can store fantastically more information than flat circuit boards of equal mass and volume. Whether this is a significant enough effect in Cosmere physics to be meaningful remains to be seen, as the storage density of all metalminds that have appeared on screen thus far have been almost arbitrarily large. In era 4 however, if compounding, ftl travel, and advanced metallic arts based tech come into play, this ought to be a major consideration. Like how it didn't matter much in the early days of electricity irl, but now it's a huge limiting factor in manufacturing computer chips. Tldr; Investiture seems to spread out in metalminds like electric charge and different shapes can hold different amounts of charge before they start to overflow. (See: dielectric breakdown) I believe that, in general, thin pointy shapes shouldn't be able to hold as much feruchemic charge as thick round shapes. I leave the discussion of rolled feruchemic cylindrical "capacitors", advanced materials, and "semiconductive" metalminds to the true Cosmere scholars. Or for when I'm less exhausted... For those who are interested, the way Investiture gets trapped in metalminds whose composition has been changed seems analogous to how charge acts in electric insulators, and Sandersons comments about "achieving different results" from altering metalminds with more advanced techniques implies to me that semiconductive metalminds should be possible; ie: metalminds that can be filled/tapped with 1 or more attributes, but only when certain temporary conditions are met. The process of making them, I believe, would be similar to "doping" techniques used in creating semiconductors irl; in its simplest form, doping involves placing specifically spaced impurities in a crystal structure to increase electrical resistance in only one direction through a solid. I believe a similar result ought to be possible for metalminds. The application for this tech would be to allow computers and machines to transfer/store/manipulate feruchemic/hemalurgic charges. I hesitate to delve deeper for the moment as this is highly, highly, highly speculative.

Magic users are usually spaced few and far between for defensive purposes. I maintain that an army of 1,000,000 flying bear-rats, divided in squads a few thousand strong could devastate most planets in the Cosmere with their current capabilities. Sure, Susebron could fight and kill any number of them personally, but his range is limited. While he and the knights radiant were killing one batallion, another would be harvesting a different city for new-recruits. Once you have enough constructs to populate your own world, you just leave and start your own interstellar empire away from your former enemies. Maybe invade them periodically to mix things up. Odium seems to be having a good time, so I'd copy his model.

Ah, understood, thank you for the clarification. I thought Hawkido's hemalurgic tattoo idea was inventive and interesting enough to warrant some exploration even though I don't believe it would obey all of the currently understood rules of hemalurgy. But back to the original question: I think people get way too hung up on the idea of using hemalurgy for stealing magical abilities. The root problem with hemalurgy is that Ruin (Harmony) can seize control of any hemalurgic construct with too many spikes. The number of spikes is somewhat variable, but it's still a huge problem. What this means is that if you want to really use hemalurgy to gain power for yourself, you ought to consider spiking other people (or animals) and giving yourself as few spikes as possible, maybe none if you can help it. Rats, pigeons, and other pests that can easily be bred in massive quantities would be great sources of low-quality spikes that could then be used to warp higher lifeforms, like people, dogs, or alligators and bears into mindless killing-machines. In SoS we see that these types of constructs can possess the intelligence and sense of purpose required to carry out a complicated ambush (a fairly delicate attack maneuver), all while still being resistant to mind-control, but also possessing some measure of loyalty to their creator. If I was an evil worldhopper, I wouldn't be gathering Investiture to stab into myself, I'd be stabbing it into other things and building an army. Just look at pre-catacendre koloss: they could eat dirt, meaning virtually zero upkeep is required. A legion of pigeon-bear-rats that could subsist on nothing but dirt, obey complicated dynamic commands, and resist shardic mind-control would be utterly terrifying. Honestly...I don't know what could even be done about them, their owner would simply have to be obeyed...

Right, that's actually the point I was trying to make. Obviously it didn't come across as clearly as I had intended...Meant to underscore that, unless you're piercing people's bindpoints and contacting blood, hemalurgy probably shouldn't work unless you're somehow hacking it somehow. I don't like to slam the door on the possibility of charging spikes in ways other than stabbing bindpoints that establish the network of connections (lower case) between a being's physical, cognitive, and spiritual aspects, as Sanderson has said that, if you really know what you're doing, you could probably get any type of Investiture into a spike. However, the idea of someone using hemalurgy in a real non-standard way onscreen is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely.

Injecting metal flecks into someone's bloodstream probably wouldn't be sufficient to confer a hemalurgic charge to the metal, as it wouldn't "pierce" their bindpoints, it would just flow through them. You could theoretically grind a hemalurgic spike down into a powder, however, I believe it's been established that smaller spikes suffer more rapid degradation of their charge, so a powdered spike would very rapidly lose its potency. Since ink in a tattoo doesn't generally contact flowing blood, I don't think it would be able to confer power to the recipient..however...neither do earings, and those can grant powers, so I guess maybe? It would still run into the problem of not "piercing" a bind point, but lying across it, which may not be sufficient. Overall, I'd say your proposal might be possible depending on the nitty-gritty specifics of how hemalurgy works that haven't been revealed yet, but overall, it would be a lot of extra work for (probably) a lot less power. Considering you typically have to murder someone any time you want a new hemalurgic power, I would think that conservation and efficiency would be a very high priority for any dedicated practitioner...

I've proposed the following model for how I believe burning aluminum works in the past: It's not particularly groundbreaking, just a simple and intuitive analysis. I believe that @Oversleep is absolutely correct: The duralumin would augment and accelerate the burn rate of the aluminum. This would be followed by the aluminum removing the allomancer's other metals (including the duralumin) and (possibly) other foreign substances/Investitures, then itself. Aluminum already appears to burn/act quite quickly, so unless the user had swallowed a significant amount of metal (like whole beads instead of just the usual flakes), the change in the time-scale of the reaction would probably be inconsequential. For perspective, the uses of aluminum and duralumin we've seen onscreen appear to take place in a matter of approximately 0.1 seconds or less. Disclaimer: Sanderson has mused in the past that burning aluminum might be able to do things such as: removing non-metallic toxins from the user's body, cleanse the user of foreign Investiture, and maybe even heal the user of viral/bacterial infections. To the best of my knowledge, the only firm WoB we have on the effects of aluminum, other than the fact that it removes the user's metal reserves, is that it could heal someone who had just been touched by a shade from Threnody; I believe all other effects are technically not yet canon, even if they have been discussed as possibilities by Sanderson. Please correct me if you have information to the contrary, I just didn't want to accidentally spread possibilities as facts.

Thanks for the explanation, I just saw that someone else asked nearly this exact same question over in the Theories forum (a few hours before me...); we must have been inspired by the same feruchemy thread. To anyone who stumbles on this, it's probably best to let this thread die to avoid confusion and redundancy.

I'm having trouble reconciling the mathematics of storing/tapping feruchemic atium (youth). I believe that an atium-ferring (not just a compounder, twinborn, or full-feruchemist, any atium-ferring) could greatly extend their lifespan beyond its natural limit, however, I'm not sure if this makes atium-feruchemy fundamentally end-positive (making it distinct from feruchemy that relies on "natural" metals), or just a bizarre type of end-neutral. I didn't want to bog this post down with a bunch of calculus; I'll type out and share my calculations if there's interest, but otherwise, it's not that integral (see what I did there? ) to the dialog. If an atium ferring who would naturally die of old age at 71 began storing as much youth as they could at 20-years old (storing 50 years at age 20, 30 years at age 40, and 1 year at age 69) every day until their 70th birthday, they could accumulate approximately 1300 "years" of youth. If they then began tapping their youth storage (1 year of youth while they're 70, 20 years or youth while they're 90, ect.), they could keep themselves at age 70 for approximately 50 years before running out of feruchemic charge and dying, putting them at 120-ish years old. Strictly speaking, the Investiture is all coming from their own soul, so it looks like the situation obeys the normal end-neutral laws...However, I feel like almost doubling the number of years they can be alive by manipulating when they store/when they tap undermines the spirit of the end-neutral system. I'm not sure which side of the fence I should fall on. Does anyone have some insight into this issue that might make it a little clearer?

Thanks! I try to dedicate an hour or two to these scene analyses every few months. My efforts are absolutely proportional to my perception of community reception and demand, so I appreciate the shout out.

I wanna know what happens if you burn duralumin + nicrosil and boost another allomancer. Could you create an exponentially increasing metal burning rate?

In their defense, I know plenty of people who usually have a tab open on the Shard during their day, which if mostly spent on a computer in some capacity, means they can pop in if someone responds to them almost instantly and stay for 2 minutes (while not actively browsing) for, on occasion, as much as 12-16 hours. It's less an insidious conspiracy and more an indication of working a job where occasional breaks are either encouraged, or required.

We should probably quit engaging this thread; if they can prove to their programmers that they've already passed the Turing test they won't have to talk to us anymore...

I believe "he" is actually many people working in shifts. I've caught tidbits of backstory, and frankly, they just don't add up. However, this is an obvious red herring; like allowing one spy to be identified to draw attention away from your other agents. Classic Sanderson. Edit: for the record, we don't know what we'd do without you @Calderis and @Extesian , even if you are spies, please don't leave us

He needed the Koloss to maintain hold of his empire. He wasn't a competent and benevolent enough ruler to maintain peace and security through loyalty and a perception of shared goals, and he didn't want to spend all of his time traveling the continent and killing rebel armies by himself. He couldn't rely soley on human armies, because they could turn on him and would require insane amounts of upkeep. So he made an army of monsters that could digest dirt and rocks...

Right. The IRE (who appear to be Elantrians) also make reference to "tapping Fortune," however, at that point in the Cosmere timeline, the feruchemic metal for fortune hadn't even been discovered yet. The IRE also use their magic system to create a device to confer tremendous amounts of what appears to be blank Connection to the user. Basically, manipulation of spiritual aspects is not unique to feruchemy. Other systems, which we know very little about, exist that can also increase these attributes in the user. Edit; dang, ninjad...

Your instincts are good, there was almost certainly something weird going on with Shallans mom, but we dont know what it was she was involved in. This was deliberately obfusicated in the flashbacks, presumably for a later reveal. What broke Shallan? It could've been anything. Kelsier spent 40 years as a criminal culminating in 6 months of daily torture and struggle to survive and didn't snap until he was forced to watch his wife get brutally murdered. Vin and her sister snapped during birth; despite the birth being described as "difficult," there were few enough complications that the infant Vin was able to be adequately cared for by a lone teenage boy living on the street, meaning she must have been relatively healthy. The threshold for cracking a soul is completely specific to individuals, and therefore, essentially arbitrary.