cometaryorbit

Actually, liquid investiture is supposed to be the most powerful form, at least on Scadrial... From https://wob.coppermind.net/events/243/#e6072

Day 41: A-Steel and F-Bendalloy (Push on metals + store/tap calories and hydration.) Hmm. A top tier Allomantic power plus a niche but useful Feruchemical one; no great synergy between them. I don't think you can really use Bendalloy to change weight the way it works in the MAG, but maybe? Resonance: maybe something about more precisely controlling the energy of Pushes, or more precisely detecting the weight of Pushed objects? Name: Hungershot? Rating: 3 / 10. Unimpressive as a Twinborn, but not among the worst due to having one of the better Allomantic powers. 4/10 if using Bendalloy to change weight really works.

Zane's spike did boost A-Steel.

I see three possibilities: - TLR didn't intend to have kids, but wasn't willing to kill them (or the mother) either. - at the beginning TLR didn't actually worry about the risk of mixing Feruchemy and Allomancy; that's something that developed later in his reign. He got rid of the Feruchemists so he could obscure history & to remove an alternate source of religious authority that would claim he wasn't the real Hero of Ages, not to prevent the risk of mixing with Allomancy. - TLR didn't originally expect to be immortal; he didn't think of atium compounding day-one. So he originally intended to marry and found a dynasty like a regular king, and was getting old and preparing to turn it over to his heir, and then he realized he could be immortal by atium compounding. -- I do like the idea of his descendants ending up in the South, though. I just don't see how it can work.

Brandon has said that he hasn't decided yet whether they replicate DNA and thus whether a DNA-era blood test could spot one or not. So this might be possible eventually. Maybe in Era 3, maybe not -- 1980s tech is right on the line where this became possible. First forensic DNA use was mid-1980s. Scadrial tech development is roughly analogous to ours but not identical, so it'd be easy to justify either it being known or unknown. If they can pass a DNA test, though, then they really should be able to reproduce with humans. If they can put just human DNA in white blood cells, they should be able to put just human DNA in gametes.

Yeah. Liquid investiture is very powerful, so it'd probably block the magical cutting just fine, but still be cut like it would be if hit by a regular mundane sword. Like a thin piece of aluminum - it'd block the magical super-cutting but the physical sword blow would still damage it. About Scadrial ... there *is* that WoB that Ruin and Preservation "didn't create the atoms", so perhaps it wasn't literally created by raw Investiture to matter conversion. They might have assembled the physical planet of Scadrial from asteroids and extra gas-giant moons and such, and then transformed it (Harmony-Ascension style) into a habitable world suitable for humans, making oceans and a breathable atmosphere by transmuting elements, making coal and moving around/adding ore bodies, etc. Then created life and humanity on top.

OK then. We know basically nothing about Twinborn Resonances so I'll just be posting what sounds cool or vaguely relevant, rather than any sensible theorizing. Day 40: A-Chromium / F-Electrum Leeching plus storing/tapping "determination" (nominally ... but it sounds more like a controllable bipolar state). Eh. It's a very cool but pretty niche Allomantic power, a really weak Feruchemical one, and not much synergy... a fairly weak combo, though there's worse out there. Resonance: determination plus destruction of metals/Investiture drain equals ???. The best I can come up with is increased ability to Leech through interference (either Leeching really highly Invested beings, or things like being able to win a Leeching duel with another Leecher, or more resistance to aluminum primer cube fields, or something). Name: A-Chromium is Leecher, F-Electrum is Pinnacle ... hmm. Nothing comes to mind. Suggestions? Rating: 2.5/10. Not the worst combo, but not good in either individual powers or synergy. Role: Maybe decent in a military team or special SWAT-style police squad against other Metalborn?

Aethers are weird. IMO the matter made by an aether is solid (or whatever state of matter) Investiture in one sense, but not in the same sense god metals are. It is, in the sense that there's an Investiture->matter conversion happening (or pulling matter from the Spiritual... but since everything in the Spiritual exists as/is made of Investiture it's the same thing imo). So they are in a literal sense Investiture made solid (or whatever state). But it's not a "body of a Shard" kind of thing like the god metals we've seen, with inherent power stored within it. It's not even permanent as matter without Investiture input. Roseite would crumble away if not sustained; god metals can just sit around for ages and stay intact. I'm also not sure the Roseite that gets created is really the aether. It seems like the piece in Prasanva is a living aether piece connected back to the primal aether Silajana. The Roseite power-armor seems temporary and "artificial", not really alive in the same way.

Would anyone mind if I started posting these combos instead?

Oops, I see @Quantus used the same concept a month ago. I think I'm mostly out of ideas, then.

Actually, given Endowment's comment in her letter about 'if Rayse becomes a problem he will be dealt with', I think that might be exactly why she intervened in making Nightblood. I think for regular Physical beings like humans or singers -- regular reproduction, not Preservation creating a new start of humanity from scratch -- it might be more like the new sentient/sapient being just kind of automatically "attracting" or "being assigned" Investiture in the Spiritual Realm. This WoB implies that "pull[ing] Investiture for a soul" is just kind of default when a sapient being is created. But I don't think parents lose Investiture when they have a child. There's infinite (or close enough) Investiture in the Spiritual Realm, and souls/spiritwebs are all in the Spiritual. This isn't a matter of actually drawing Investiture into the Physical Realm, just reassigning it within the Spiritual (a new Identity and its Connections). The same probably applies for anything, really. An object has a spiritual aspect made of Investiture. A human soul's just larger/more complex and has more Investiture. But the same principles probably apply. The Investiture's already there in the Spiritual, but a new Identity "labels" it now.

Concentrated liquid investiture is really strong, I think it'd take a lot of compounding to match that.

I don't think Odium is predicting Dalinar will become Honor fully (though that is possible), I think he's saying that Dalinar already has enough Honor-power that the Intent will eventually affect him. It doesn't take a full Shard to get Intent effects. Zahel/Vasher says that it happens to Cognitive Shadows like himself, and Returned aren't working with that much Investiture -- nothing like the scale of Bondsmith Spren. Dalinar isn't personally Invested to the level the Stormfather is - not even close - but if he keeps having Ascension/riding the highstorm moments, or maybe even just keeps opening that perpendicularity all the time for years...

Mistborn are way rarer than 1 per 18 Mistings in general. Straff's illegitimate children aren't representative of the nobility in general, since Straff is a Great House (House Venture) Allomancer. According to Kelsier in TFE, nearly all Mistborn are in the Great Houses. The rest of the nobility very rarely produce Mistborn. Even among the non-Great Houses, there are stronger and weaker lines. The Cetts are specifically poor in Allomancy. -- Yeah, even though only 8 of 16 metals were known to most of the nobility, it seems like those are the more common powers - so it wasn't literally 50% of Mistings were unknown. -- There were probably thousands of Mistings in the Central Dominance alone. The Soothing Station 200+ were recruited from the Central Dominance, supposedly, and they weren't literally all Soothers / Seekers in the Dominance.

Treetenders (Cohesion/Progression) Order Theme/Core Ideal: I will sustain This Order has the mastery of life. They can reshape, heal, and grow living things. They were historically a retiring Order which preferred to work behind the scenes. Where the Edgedancers were combat medics, the Treetenders were responsible for advanced and specialized medicine as well as improving crops and livestock, curing crop blights, and so on. Surges: Progression and Cohesion Progression is used to speed the growth of plants, or as Regrowth, to heal. Cohesion is used to soften and reshape solid matter. Their combined Surge effect lets them use Cohesion on living matter, which isn't normally possible. Resonance: Treetenders can evaluate the health of a plant or animal by touching it. Truespren: Kelpspren A kelpspren in the Physical Realm looks like a single ribbon of sea-green color. In Shadesmar, it appears as a humanoid figure made of seaweed. Platespren: Wavespren Ideals 1st: standard 2nd: I will sustain what must live 3rd: I will heal what grows weak 4th and 5th ideals are more personalized. The 4th often involves an acceptance of the inability to heal all suffering.

I think the mass density of Light must be extremely low, much lower than any ambient-pressure gas, given the very small explosions in RoW. When Fused get stabbed with anti-Voidlight, they burn rather than detonate; it's probably containing the energy in a small gem that makes it explode.

I don't think the Shattered Plains temperatures are particularly extreme in either direction - that seems to be true for much of Roshar. It doesn't really have seasons, variations are pretty muted outside the highstorms themselves.

Huh, just stumbled on this WoB...

Quite possible. I wasn't talking about the Heraldic Epochs but the time between Aharietiam and the False Desolation, when the Radiants had 2500 years to develop uninterrupted by Desolations, and had Urithiru as a cross-Roshar teleport nexus. I'm not at all sure that access to Radiant/ancient fabrial abilities was so rare that it wouldn't affect technological development, in those times. The Oathgates were apparently important to trade. Soulcasters were presumably rare ... but one individual can Soulcast a lot of material. They're key to feeding the warcamps, which are huge. And food, unlike e.g. metals, gets used up quickly.

I think probably the Inquisitors had atium-electrum spikes, and that only steals Allomantic Temporal powers, and they weren't really stealing A-Atium (which probably doesn't exist as a power anyway, if anyone can burn atium) but A-Electrum (which allowed them to burn the electrum-atium). Atium "must be refined" to steal any power - not to work at all in Hemalurgy. The Era 1 Inquisitors didn't know how to make it steal any power, only Allomantic Temporal powers. So I don't think they were using the refined form.

Yeah, unfortunately we don't know enough about what the Spiritual metals do in Feruchemy.

Leshwi implies it; RoW ch 109

Oh, right -- I didn't put it in the original post, but the Girl Who Looked Up story was part of what originally got me thinking about longer timelines: that story could imply that humans had forgotten why they were supposed to stay in Shinovar, only remembering that they were supposed to. But the Raboniel's grandmother thing seems to rule that out. Singer generations are shorter than human, and I'd think forgetting the purpose of the prohibition would take centuries. Raboniel's family is a problem for the obvious interpretation based on Herald ages (less than 30 years) but it also rules out extremely long timelines. So maybe the story is instead about the experimenting with Surges on Ashyn, and the "Wall" is a prohibition against doing that, and God's Light is the Surges rather than Stormlight specifically? - I'd think probably post-Aharietiam but pre-Recreance. I doubt the Silver Kingdoms effectively occupied all of Roshar, even if they claimed it all. The singers were likely fairly marginal, without access to their Odium-based powers or their ancient ones. ...Maybe. One thing I'd love to know is how relevant "ancient fabrials" and Radiant Surge use was to human civilization of that time. The Oathgates were apparently important to trade. Could average people who were deathly sick have a reasonable chance of getting healed by an Edgedancer? Were Radiants Soulcasting heavily enough that that was a major source of resources? I wouldn't be surprised if it did work that way, and if that was actually suppressing the kind of proto-scientific/industrial development we see on modern Roshar. But if it did, that civilization would be so powerful that the singers couldn't be remotely competitive. They'd be basically stone age, since mining is so hard on Roshar, and without their ancient Stoneshaping abilities. OTOH, human/singer hybrids (ancestors of Horneaters and Herdazians) originated at some point. Was that during the Silver Kingdoms post-Aharietiam era before the False Desolation, when Singers weren't the enemy anymore? Maybe humans and singers lived side by side in some of the Silver Kingdoms, as citizens. Or was it at the very beginning, some kind of political marriage to seal the original pact? - Hmm. That would make the Honorblades make more sense, and so make this theory less necessary. The timeline itself & ages are still iffy, but maybe it could be squeezed (Raboniel's mother was already around when humans arrived & Essu was made Fused very young / Shalash was Jez's adopted daughter not biological).

I don't think what F-Iron stores is really mass in the usual sense. I also think that the attempt to make it more like mass than weight, to synergize with Wax's Pushing, opened more problems than it solved*; if it just was "how much gravity affects you" I think none of these problems would exist. I think to make it work with the observed behavior, it needs to be heavily Spiritual (ie pure magic). It has to do something odd, like what's actually being stored is a kind of Spiritual spiritweb variable for your overall mass, which doesn't really affect things that happen on a smaller scale (like bullet impact depth issues); or it only affects your effective mass for forces like gravity and Steelpushes, not for ordinary collisions; or something like that. The second one would be really weird, but I think it'd explain what we see quite well. It'd be like decoupling gravitational from inertial mass, except that Steelpushes/Ironpulls work off gravitational mass. That would make bullets pierce high-weight people just fine, since impact depth is an inertia/momentum thing. The cosmere likely does have a preferred frame of reference IMO - it would make FTL easier, and the Cognitive Realm might provide one - but that doesn't explain the bullet piercing/impact depth issues, or the lack of super powerful punches, IMO. *I wouldn't be surprised if Era 1 was written with the idea that it's just (gravitational) weight. Sazed says it is in WoA, and in HoA he fights with it by tackling and dropping his fists (boosted by gravity) not by super punching. When he uses it as an anchor (like the gates of Luthadel) he's touching the ground, so gravitational weight would help there.

Perhaps the amount of color needed is small enough that it's rarely relevant. Only one Breath is being transferred, so even a small gray squirrel has enough color to "fuel" that. I wonder if you cut open that Lifeless squirrel, would its blood be gray? The change may not be totally external. Also, by WoB giving up your Breath uses "your own color", and Drabs aren't obviously visibly different - Vivenna only notices that Jewels is Drab with heightened life sense; she's not obviously an unnatural gray color. So I think the amount of color needed to fuel the transfer of one Breath is small compared to what's in a human.