Lewis Nethur

@StrikerEZ I guess my real problem with firesouls is we don't really know how their power works. Storing or tapping a small amount of heat makes sense for adjusting comfort, preventing overheating, or staving off hypothermia. Tapping enough heat to put your body over 110F should (from a biochemistry perspective) cause you to die from organ failure, as the way that the chemical reactions in your body take place at those temperatures is incompatible with life...Similarly, if they stored enough heat to lower their temperature too much they should also die. Being exposed to extreme external heat would require lowering your temperature tremendously to survive, however, since heat isn't conducted through the body instantaneously, this would cause your organs to shut down from cold while your skin felt comfortable. I'm starting to think that firesoul's actually manipulate their specific heat capacity and/or thermal conductivity rather than actual temperature...But even this isn't compatible with all of the WoB we've gotten on the subject... At this point I'm ready to concede that your proposed model is probably at least as likely as mine, and rescind my prior objections. Being able to grab and burn people could be pretty dope.

Atium, lerasium, harmonium, and "trellium," (not a canonized name IIRC) aren't the only candidates for being the "Lost Metal." Brandon has mentioned that: There are metals which any allomancer could burn regardless of their orientation There are vitally important things about how the metallic arts work that haven't been revealed yet It pretty much can't be lerasium as far as I'm concerned, as that would really undermine the world-building and designing Sanderson has done following the fall of the FE. New full-power mistborns would undermine a lot of the plot structure of era 2. If there are new mistborns, they have to be "weak" and extremely rare. Also, Harmony is confirmed to be the only shard Invested on Scadrial, so "trellium" wouldn't count as a God Metal in the commonly understood sense unless it is some alloy of atium, lerasium, and/or harmonium. Despite this, Sazed didn't recognize it. As far as I can tell, it's possible that there are metals outside the chart that are either compatible with the metallic arts, or that can be made compatible through some sort of hack. WARNING - WILD SPECULATION TO FOLLOW: For example, if a hemalurgic iron spike is alloyed or soulcast, it might still confer its stolen attribute. Just because no mistings/ferrings are born who are able to use a specific material, doesn't 100% confirm that that material can't be used in the metallic arts. Previous analyses of the heredity of allomancy and Scadrian population breakdowns have, IIRC, largely concluded that things like malatium mistings don't appear naturally despite the fact that malatium is a viable allomantic metal. It's possible in my mind that metals like titanium and cobalt could serve as a focus for Harmony's Investiture, but no one has discovered this because those mistings/ferrings just don't exist or are extremely rare.

@StrikerEZ Thanks! There are some slight issues with your firesoul model however (EDIT: I don't know about any of this anymore, Firesouls are weird, see next couple posts). While it's true that a firesoul in an extremely hot environment can store heat to prevent being burned, they would have to regulate their rate of storage. If they were in an oven-like environment with a uniform temperature, this would probably be pretty easy. If only their arm was on fire, things would get more complicated. (This also holds true if their various body parts were exposed to any significant thermal gradient, IE: if their clothes, being made of fibers of different thickness and compositions, were burning with fires of different temperatures) So far as we've seen, selective storage of an attribute from individual body parts is not possible in feruchemy (Sanderson hasn't stated outright that it's impossible, but he's confirmed that we've never seen anyone do it). This means that in order to keep their arm cool enough to not be roasted, their entire body would have to be cool enough that being in direct contact with fire would keep it around 98.6 degrees F; IE: they would probably go into shock and freeze to keep their arm from burning. Oddly enough, firesouls are supposedly immune to damage from tapping heat...However, tapping heat doesn't make them immune to the effects of heat from their environment... Brandon seems to indicate that if you were in a 200 F oven and you tapped heat to make your body temperature 200 F, thereby putting you at thermal equilibrium with your surroundings, you would still suffer heat damage for some reason and it would be more helpful if you instead stored heat. This is bizarre and I can't explain it using real physics. Presumably, if you tapped enough heat to light yourself on fire, your skin would still oxidize because the fire is external to you and therefore not something you would be immune to. Further, everything you touched would cause you incredible pain as you would be transferring heat to your environment so rapidly it would feel like you were freezing to death. Humans don't feel temperature, they feel the transfer of thermal energy, which is related to thermal conductivity as well as temperature difference. If I'm 98.6F and I touch a 60F metal doorknob, my hand feels "cold," and if I touch a 60F wooden knob my hand feels slightly cool. However, if I'm 400F and I touch a 60F metal doorknob, I feel like someone is dumping liquid nitrogen on my hand and I want to die. Firesoul's powers are still somewhat vaguely explained so in all likelihood some of this weirdness will be cleared up in Lost Metal, but for now, they're limitations are fairly unclear. TLDR; If you're in an oven, storing heat might be able to keep you alive, as your body temperature could theoretically be maintained at a level compatible with normal human biochemistry, however, it should technically make you feel like you've succumb to hypothermia and subsequently been lit on fire, as brass feruchemy doesn't turn off the nerves in your body that detect heat flow...

When you're stuck in traffic and all you can think about is getting out of the car and tapping iron and pushing outward with steel...

Compounding wakefulness ought to have some serious physiological/psychological consequences, just like compounding healing does, after all, it is altering how your body functions in a profound way. I predict that the user would cease to be able to feel or experience mental fatigue. Performing labor intensive work such as running ought to physically exhaust them the same way it would anyone else (eventually leading to them collapsing and being unable to move till their body could heal naturally), however, performing mentally intensive work wouldn't. Tasks such as performing intelligence analysis and investigative work, or reading/studying, and maybe walking could be performed more-or-less endlessly (as long as they stopped briefly to eat and drink regularly). A bronze compounder might actually make a better villain than hero, as never needing to sleep or feel mentally exhausted could quickly lead to some seriously sadistic tendencies, just like how never experiencing pain or injury would. Rather than mutilating themselves, they might be led to obsessive behaviors like working for dozens or hundreds of hours straight...not an inherently evil behavior to be sure, but it's deviant enough that it could easily lead to some dark places...

I completely forgot about that caveat to be totally honest; point taken, shade creation should actually be slightly rarer than I proposed. And a good thing too, newborns shouldn't be eaten by ghosts, that'd just be mean.

I'd really like to see a western or detective-style story from the perspective of a bronze compounding main character hunting rouge allomancers. A bronze savant who never needs to sleep might not be able to topple buildings or dodge bullets like Wax, but they also wouldn't have to rely on timely hints and nudges by Harmony and his kandra nearly as often to find their quarries. A double-bronze user with aluminum weaponry would make for an interesting hunter-killer against other practitioners of the metallic arts...

For the sake of argument, I would propose that post-traumatic stress would be a suitable and realistic explanation for Adolin's behavior in this scene. Adolin was used to feeling like a God on the battlefield, killing dozens (hundreds?) of enemy soldiers at a time while wildly outnumbered without suffering more than minor wounds. He is renowned as one of the greatest duelists in the world, and his father is widely speculated to be among the greatest warriors to live since the fall of the Radiants. And they didn't just lose to Szeth, they got trounced. And who saved the day? A bridgeman Adolin had been something of a jerk to. In this scenario, Adolin's wealth of combat experience could actually have worked against him in terms of the psychological effect the defeat would have on him. Renarin was brave certainly, but deep down, he probably didn't expect to win; he's a smart guy, and not afraid to face a challenge, but he's inexperienced and untrained. He got over the "defeat" because in his eyes, it could've been much worse. If Chuck Liddell (former UFC Heavyweight Champion) attacked me, and I managed to come out alive, I'd get over getting beat up relatively quickly because I'd have had no reasonable expectation of doing better than that. The emotional anguish, humiliation, and feelings of insecurity encountered by failing utterly at a task you believe you have mastered after a lifetime of disciplined training can manifest in extreme ways. Additionally, near-death experiences are known to affect different people very differently. Sanderson interviewed active duty and veteran service members during his research for the Stormlight Archive; while Adolin's intense psychological reaction to his near-death defeat by Szeth might seem unrealistic at a glance for a war-hardened veteran of dozens of intense battles, I think it's actually extremely realistic and "human" of him. It's just something that, thankfully, most people don't ever have to face. Anyhow, that was my interpretation of things. I generally don't like Adolin as a character, but I actually feel like his occasional moments of weakness make him much more believable. Back to OP's question, people exist primarily in the physical realm, which is, spatially, very rigidly and location dependent. Action at a distance magic in the physical realm is relatively short-range for other magic systems, such as those seen on Scadrial, Nalthis, Sel, and First of the Sun. Just as a general rule of thumb, if you're doing magic in the Cosmere in the Physical Realm, the effect usually manifests pretty close to your physical location. The sole exception I can think of off the top of my head is Elantrian teleportation, however, I would argue that Elantrians are weird, so this shouldn't count against me. In other words, blades probably can't be summoned any meaningful distance away from the body.

A story with a prevalence on silver and suffering horrible punishment for violating the Sabbath...Where oh where have I heard this before...? Do you think Brandon is trolling us or are the Johnny Tremain parallels totally coincidental?

He may have had a legitimate purpose, though what it was is anyone's guess. I merely meant to highlight how little concern Hoid generally has for how he spends his time. I have have been overly hyperbolic.

I mean, we're talking about a man who spent the better part of a year in the belly of some type of greatshell, apparently out of simple curiosity. I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the question, Hoid is delightfully mad.

Pretty sure @Calderis is absolutely spot on. Threnodites aren't dying out, they're expanding. People who live in the forts don't really have to worry about shades at all, and everyone in the forests know the rules that make the shades leave them alone. The only real at-risk people are: Children of families not wealthy enough to protect their homes with silver who are too young to fully understand the rules (I'm thinking like 2ish to 6ish? Idk, I don't know much about children) Fugitives/bounty hunters who operate at night Pregnant women unfortunate enough to go into labor at night while far away from a waystation Besides these at-risk individuals who make up a pretty small portion of the population, I suspect death-by-shade is a relatively infrequent occurrence. A decent analog would probably be along the lines of: People die by shade-attack on Threnody at a rate similar to the rate of accidental deaths in real life; with a big enough population, yes, you'll get a handful of occurrences a day, but even if they were significantly more common than this, a person traveling via the Cognitive Realm would likely be hard-pressed to find and get to the resulting perpendicularity before it closed.

Ha, maybe, but in my experience I simply have the search history of a typical physicist. Any spy would see the visits to the shard and XKCD and see the absurd questions I sometimes get asked by friends and family and immediately lose all interest in why I would need to reference WWII-era medical journals.

According to Marasi, kandra spikes are "narrow," less than 3 inches long, and best described as "lengths of metal." Her descriptions in BoM seem to imply that the spikes don't have "heads" like what would be found on a typical nail. They ought to be pretty close to the dimensions of a deck nail I believe, minus the head. (she describes them as almost unbelievably small) Inquisitor eye spikes are described as being roughly 1 inch in diameter at the top, about 8-10 inches long, and, judging from how the spikes get pounded straight through human bodies with wooden mallets, they probably don't have heads like normal nails either, as this would cause them to needlessly get caught in the bones and bodies of the victim while serving no function. Inquisitor spikes that aren't in the eyes are, to the best of my knowledge, never thoroughly described. They should be shorter than the eye spikes because otherwise inquisitors would have a spike protruding from the front of their throat, and narrower to avoid interfering with the placement of the ribs. For the sake of simplicity, I would assume that all of their non-eye spikes are roughly the same size, and built to roughly the same physical proportions as the eye spikes. Meaning they should be roughly 0.25 - 0.5 inches in diameter at their top and approximately 4-5 inches long. If they were wider than this they might displace bones in the chest cavity. While this isn't necessarily a deal-breaker with hemalurgy, it would make sense that they would avoid messing up their own physiology in a way that could make them weaker; ie: not having properly formed rib bones would be a serious disadvantage for inquisitors. My best guess would be that the torso spikes would also lack the "heads" found on normal nails, and be conical in shape. Otherwise pounding them through one person's chest and into another's could be frustratingly difficult rather than relatively easy. Most of this isn't directly confirmed by Brandon, it's just deduced from my own interpretation of the scenes and my rough knowledge of anatomy after a little googling of things like: "Width/spacing of human rib bones," and "average diameter of an adult male skull." Hope it helps for the sake of visualization though.

It's certainly an explanation that would fit the data points we have, and I admit I've considered it. However, I wanted to limit my budding theory to a short analysis of each rule and its implications, both physical and metaphysical, and a brief set of predictions based on those analyses. Adding in additional speculation at this point is a little premature, as I don't think I've reconciled the theory with all of the observed phenomena adequately yet. If you can give some kind of example or argument that indicates how the shades' vision functions or what it's limited to that would certainly be helpful though.

My interpretation of the Simple Rules was a little different, as they appear to be a set of "rules" developed by the people of Threndoy resulting from observations made about the behavior of the shades, rather than a set of fundamental governing rules of the magic system on the planet; similar to how the grouping of metals on the allomancy charts on Scadrial is an observed "pattern" developed by Scadrians and isn't necessarily representative of allomancy's true governing physics. In fact, the pattern seems to sort of break down and be a little unintuitive if you pick at it enough (it doesn't include God metals, some of the pairings are a little weird, it doesn't explain why specific alloys work and others don't, ect.) It's just a convenient model that generally works well enough and provides a good introduction to new initiates. A good analysis of the Simple Rules ought to be able to make predictions about how the "rules" may be circumvented, or predict new "rules" that Threnodites may not yet be aware of. My imperfect analysis thus far: Starting a fire upsets shades, but pre-existing fires carried into their presence have no apparent effect. This sort of implies that the shades are upset by change; fire is a relatively unsustainable, violent, and rapid change in the chemical makeup of a fuel source. IE: Shades react to rapid/violent change, but they have to "see" the change's initiation, otherwise they perceive it as "normal." Running only upsets shades at night. Running is an example of rapid change in position relative to a person's normal state of movement, so that fits our theme of the shades reacting to rapid changes; the fact that the shades react less strongly than to fire or blood is an indication that their reaction is based on the severity of the change (Running represents a lesser degree of change in the physical world than burning something or harming something. The fact that they don't react during the day implies that their power, or perhaps their presence in the physical realm, is strongest at night (why remains entirely unclear to me). Spilling blood really upset shades. Injury/death represents a powerful metaphysical change in the condition of the world. The fact that shades don't react if they can't "see" the blood, even if they can literally "see" a person being strangled, indicates that their response is relatively mechanical and unintelligent in its execution. IE: the shades don't "choose" to attack or, in general, possess the ability to attack on a whim or intentionally show leniency, and they react to obvious visual evidence of powerful change; if this obvious visual evidence is hidden or obscured from them, they will not react. My predictions based on these observations: If you were completely isolated from shades and started running, then after several minutes you finally passed a shade, it might not attack you. Similarly, if you began slowing down or came to a stop, they might swarm you. Rapidly affecting your environment might upset shades; IE: using a chainsaw to cut down several trees in a short period of time, eating too much too quickly, making loud noises (screaming), puncturing a pressurized container (without combustion), pouring acid onto a sheet of metal, and so on... Shades might not react to someone lighting a blowtorch, as they can't "see" the fuel before, during, or after it being burned. Things I'm having trouble reconciling: Extinguishing a fire doesn't seem to upset shades, which is somewhat inconsistent with my proposed model. If you're being chased by shades and you run past new shades that didn't see what you did, and never saw you not running, the new shades are still liable to join in on the hunt. I can only speculate to why this is. Shades are "weak" during the day, even if they are indoors or in dark places and (apparently) "strong" at night even if they are brightly illuminated. TLDR: Shades react to visual stimuli that imply a rapid/powerful change in their environment. If they are prevented from "seeing" the visual cue, they don't react. Thoughts, criticisms, or supplements?

That doesn't sound quite right, as I'm pretty sure it would produce a bunch of other unwanted effects... Basically, you're storing your body's property of having mass. This gets into hardcore field theory and relativity quickly, which I'm not up to exploring in this forum. Suffice it to say that an atom doesn't have mass simply by virtue of its being an atom. It's mass is like a derived property that it is granted to it by some combination of the fields and energy composing the space it appears to occupy. In real life, I don't believe there is any known way by which an atoms mass can be significantly (keyword) reduced without destroying it. Ie, in the Cosmere, the property of mass is not as fundamental and immutable. We can conceive a universe where matter can be massless, it would just be different from what we're used to. (Like magic...)

Fair enough. I was trying to offer OP a simplified explanation of what I understand is the most commonly supported theory that depicted how useful copper compounding could be. In my experience, many people get confused or think compounding copper would be useless when all they hear is: "you could copy memories." When really, this would be an extraordinarily powerful ability. I'll grant you that your explanation is probably more literally correct, but it fails to directly demonstrate for the reader how and why the ability would be valuable; while this isn't precisely what OP asked for, I think it's probably what they wanted when they originally thought of the question.

When you fill a metalmind when compounding, you're essentially using Harmony's Investiture in place of your own. IE: Through compounding, Miles could store health without feeling sick or weak, a pewter compounder could fill a pewtermind with strength without becoming wizened and frail, and a bronze compounder could store wakefulness without feeling sleepy. It logically follows that a copper compounder should be able to store memories without removing the memories from their own mind. It's speculated that this is related to TLR's perfect and flawless memory: Burn Copper Store a memory Memory isn't removed from brain Tap memory from coppermind The memory is now reinforced in your mind and slightly hardened against gradual breakdown and natural memory loss (like how if you recite something in your head over and over, you can remember it better) Rinse and repeat If you walked around all day every day constantly compounding copper to repeatedly store/tap everything you experienced, first, you would probably get really good at it, and second, you might be able to simulate having a flawless memory. Bear in mind, this is still just speculation for the time being.

Just did a sweep of Mistborn but couldn't find the source I was looking for. Anyhow, yes, mistings have always existed on Scadrial, but they were exceptionally rare prior to the TLR's ascension. Following his ascension, I believe Sazed explains to Vin at one point that for at least a couple generations, all of the children of the lerasium-mistborn TLR created were also mistborn. I believe he explains that the first mistings were regarded almost as unfortunate-cripples to be shunned by the rest of the nobility; I can't find a quote backing this up at the moment, so you know, grain-of-salt and all that; I might be remembering it wrong. Do you have a source saying regular soother and rioters could ever take control of a kandra by themselves? I thought it was just strong mistborn, or teams of rioters/soothers. It would be interesting if it was actually confirmed that a misting with access to only one metal could theoretically be more powerful in that metal than a "weak" mistborn.

I personally subscribe to the theory that Adonalsiums Intent is the philosophical superposition of the Intents (both primary and secondary) of the 16 Shards. It would therefore not be something which could be deduced logically. Pretty sure it's been confirmed that a splinter can theoretically have an Intent not obviously related to its parent Shard, so bear in mind that Adonalsiums Intent may be subject to that as well. I propose that Adonalsium is the name of Adonalsiums Intent. It's derived from the Hebrew name for Lord, which in this context, would mean something along the lines of, "creator of everything," "parent of all," or in simple English, "Divine One." IE: Adonalsiums Intent is roughly equal to the abstract concept of: "Divinity"

I think somewhere in AU Brandon mentions that writing the annotated Jak stories was one of his favorite writing experiences to date, as it allowed him to really go off the wall with the voice of the narrative without messing up the persona of any main-stage characters, all while still revealing interesting supplementary world-building tidbits. Might be a couple years, but all things considered, I'd actually be shocked if he didn't put some Jak stories together for the next AU or SH type of publication; it might end up being a collaborative work, but given the quality of Sixth of Dusk, I'd be happy with that.

TLR's original 16 Inquisitors were made before mistings were common; in fact, for several generations after the ascension, mistings were virtually (completely?) unheard of, meaning he would almost certainly have made the first batch of Inquisitors out of mistborn who were nearly as powerful as lerasium-mistborn using spikes taken from mistborn who were nearly as powerful as lerasium-mistborn. I'd posit that those first inquisitors probably had greater allomantic strength than is possible through lerasium; I'll grant you that we definitely didn't see them so we can't be totally sure, but it seems likely. I think you're right that the inquisitors didn't normally bother with double spikes for most of the powers. They were highly trained, war-hardened, veteran allomancers that lived unnaturally long lives (confirmed by WoB, and it's implied, if not confirmed, that Kaar lived >200 years). Where normal allomancers were trained in stealth and subtlety, inquisitors were trained to wreck lives as graphically and gratuitously as possible; where a normal mistborn might duck, hide, and sneak, an inquisitor would have been more likely to tear down a building. Are you sure they had allomantic tin? They were blind and navigated by steelsight, which meant they could already "see" in total darkness and pierce the mists. Enhanced hearing seems redundant when you can pierce copperclouds, and can actually be a weakness, and considering that their spikes caused them constant pain and discomfort, I would think that enhanced sense of touch would be extremely uncomfortable for them. Taste and smell seem almost useless in a world covered in smoke and ash, at least in terms of hunting people in a city.

I hadn't considered it being a resonance thing before, that could actually make sense.

Wow @The One Who Connects , thanks for weighing in, that's actually a really helpful and insightful explanation; always feels good to walk away from one of these threads feeling like you learned something.