robardin

Being double anything as a Twinborn means you can Compound the Feruchemical attribute, so it's never completely useless. While I can't really say what would be the result of Compounding for... Let's see... Infinite Identity, well I guess maybe we will find out, LOL. OTOH being a Twinborn with, say, A-duralumin (gnat) and F-nicrosil (Investiture) would be truly useless. You can do nothing useful with your own Allomantic power, and your Feruchemical power would be to store that ability in a metalmind so that someone else could do nothing useful with it!

Haha. Well, apparently there was no steak handy either. I didn’t realize the spikes wouldn’t decay if simply left in the dead body, though!

I think this or a similar discussion has been raised before, and I gave this same answer: I think Bart Simpson already did it.

I see what you are implying there. LOL

Well hold on a moment. First, I assume we're talking about hemalurgic spikes harvested from human Metalborn. Does hemalurgy work across species? Since it works on the principle of "tearing off bits of the soul" to attach to another soul and all. Seems like it'd have to be "soul-compatible" to stick that way. I could see maybe making a "kolossal" chicken out of four original chickens*, but using koloss spikes on a chicken, not so much? But, if you were to decide yeah, you COULD stick an Inquisitor's spikes into a chicken to useful effect, even if that didn't mean the chicken were ABLE to Steelpush, etc., due to lack of sapience, would it at least serve as a kind of living repository to keep the spikes from decaying in power? Like, say you're Kar the Inquisitor who just witnessed "poor Bendal" getting decapitated by Kelsier at the "Square of the Survivor". You rush in to extract some of his spikes for potential reuse, the hard-to-obtain ones for Feruchemy he happened to have for example; then realize in frustration that you didn't have the usual jar of fresh human blood as a preservative because nobody had expected Kelsier to actually WIN that fight, ... ...and then you spy the chicken clucking quietly in on a curb while the Lord Ruler appeared in his coach to quell the surge of exultant and rebellious skaa. Hello! [ *EDIT: I am now imagining a point in Scadrian history where Kolossal Fried Chicken is a fast-food chain with a secret process involving Awakened metalminds at the slaughterhouse. "Why buy a bucket of chicken parts, when you can buy a single ... KOLOSSAL CHICKEN!" ]

Well it's not an "entire culture", there are multiple nations and cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, often at odds with each other. But many of them do seem to share the mask-wearing practice, to different degrees (the Hunters who NEVER remove them, versus those like Allik who do so, but infrequently and momentarily, as a gesture of respect or intimacy - where his airship captain regarded him as being particularly "free" with that). But we also know that there is a group in the Southern Hemisphere Allik referred to as "The Deniers of Masks" in BoM who were "really dangerous" as compared to the Set who just captured, tortured, and killed a number of his ship's crew, that we don't see or hear mention of at all in TLM. "The Maskless" (of who the DoMs may be synonmyous, or a subgroup thereof) are shown as having an entire region in the lower right of the Era 2 "Map of Scadrial", extending to an unknown degree off the map. Whether or not their refusal or "denial" of mask-wearing is at all related to them being "really dangerous", is also up for question!

Well, you would want to Compound it at least a little bit, just so you wouldn't have to compensate for putting wakefulness into the bronzemind by spending time being drowsy. The downside to that would be that the normal Allomantic power for bronze would not be very useful IRL; not much point in being a Seeker unless other Allomancers (or magic users) were walking around. (Hmm, maybe that's the pitch, then - if you AREN'T a Seeker, how would you KNOW there weren't other Investiture users walking around all of a sudden?) As for enjoying sleeping - is that when you're a Viking? - I have a headcanon theory that that's why TLR got more and more cruel, uncaring, and jaded/tired/bored seeming as his life extended longer and longer. Once he was past a normal Investure-extended lifespan of say 120 years, tops (with infinite A-pewter and F-gold), Rashek had to continuously tap his atiumminds for youth, and I think we have it established that you can't unconsciously tap or fill a metalmind. So TLR could never sleep, he had to keep on keepin' on with the never-ending tapping and occasional compounding and filling of those atiumminds. And possibly electrumminds to keep the Determination up to bother doing so. And never sleeping can do weird things to your mind, even with infinite goldmind tapping, which doesn't seem to address mental health as that is literally cognitive.

I didn't think a brass Compounder would be like the Human Torch, but that could be interesting. If Cosmere-derived magic-physics were similar to that in the Marvel Universe, then if you could pull off the Human Torch Effect, you could fly around, too! And waitaminute... Compounding is like squaring a Metalborn power... And four squared is... SIXTEEN, hot diggity dog!

Huh, I wouldn't have thought of depression as "lack of determination" but I guess that does put a different context to it that I was thinking it would be! As for Compounding brass, it wouldn't be day-to-day useful like some of the others, but it would be very useful to have a lot of it pre-stored due to Compounding (and not chilling yourself for long periods of time) for when you DO find it necessary or convenient to tap a brassmind. It wouldn't have to be a "lot of time outdoors", either, or even some "crash landed in the mountains / swimming away from the Titanic in arctic waters" hypothermia scenario - just your typical "person who wears a sweater in the office with the thermostat set to 68F" would probably tap it here and there without even thinking about it much. The tie-breaker, though, would be in how useful the normal Allomantic power for the metal would be, without using it to Compound for the Feruchemical attribute. In which case, being a Soother would be very useful in daily life, but being an Oracle who can see their own future by upwards of 30 seconds ahead could be even more useful, if you're a pro athlete. Imagine that, a baseball batter who somehow always avoids swinging at the wipeout slider, or knows exactly where the next pitch will be coming in! (Unless the pitcher is also burning electrum, LOL!)

We don't really know what some of the attributes are like to tap, Feruchemically, at least not yet (like Fortune, Determination, or even what would would mean to Compound memories in a coppermind). But of the attributes we can see getting tapped from a metalmind so far, and considering "what if I had a nigh-infinite, net positive leveraged way of gaining that attribute for later use", they all seem pretty useful IRL. The least useful to me would be "determination", I think, because we haven't seen what it would really change about a person. If it is what it seems like it would be - like, holding fast against something like torture, temptation, etc., - then I have to say, I'm either fortunate or determinate enough on my own never to have really regretted failing to do something due to lack of determination. As for Compounding weight with iron, that seems obviously useful. We've seen how Wax uses it to help with his Steelpushing, but the same thing would apply in everyday life. Not only would FILLING an ironmind be useful to make yourself lighter, being able to tap an ironmind to make yourself heavier or MUCH heavier would be extremely useful in many physical situations (wrestling being an obvious scenario) where your body weight as a counterweight is important. Like, being able to push something heavy isn't about "strength" so much as having as much or more weight as the object being pushed. The idea that someone huge and muscled will push, say, a refrigerator easier, lies mostly in the fact that someone huge and muscled is going to be a lot heavier than a normal person. (Whether they have the stamina to push it for a long time, or to do it again and again, is a different story.)

I'm going to guess that the Fifth Ideal represents enhanced resonance. So for Windrunners where the resonance of the two Surges of Adhesion and Gravitation results in squad-squiring, maybe a Fifth Ideal Windrunner can squire at will instead of "it just kind of, I dunno, happens?" Like, Kaladin was at a loss to figure out why Skar took longer than Lyn to squire to him even though Skar was OG Bridge Four; why Rlain and Dabbid never have at all (he thought Dabbid was held back by being mute, but in fact he's not); and all of Bridge Thirteen just "up and squired" to Teft as soon as he swore the Third Ideal. So maybe Fifth Ideal Kaladin could just point at Dabbid and squire him up?

Well, according to Yomen who wasn't surprised at all about the fixed and recurring 16% figure in the "mistfallen", because "it figures prominently in Church doctrine". Yomen was as devout a Minstry obligator as they came - even founding the post-Catacendre religion of "Sliverism" that continued to revere Rashek, The Lord Ruler - so figuring out there were (or must be) sixteen Allomantic metals in total, with some unknown to them for reasons of God (Rashek), was hardly "heretical", and Yomen felt free to drop that on someone not of the priestly caste in Elend. In fact, as a high nobleman, he may even has been subtly chastising Elend for not knowing his doctrine well enough!

Oh, and back to the actual topic of the OP of this thread: I would say the obvious answer is, through practical experimentation. Remember, Kwaan was able to see through or past Ruin's changes in writen texts and the contents of copperminds (that even if Ruin couldn't "see" well directly, he could evidently see/modify the Investiture within them just fine at the Spiritual level) because he naturally possessed eidetic recall - a "photographic memory" - in which he was fully confident. Alone among all Feruchemists, he could say "yo, my coppermind got hacked" instead of "eh, guess I didn't remember what my coppermind had it in it the last time I tapped it, because I put that memory back into the coppermind, that's just how it goes, yup yup". And once he suspected this was going on (since at that time, the Worldbringers were fully aware of the nature and intent of Ruin in their religious doctrine - just not of how he had subtly altered the Terris Prophecies over time), I could see him trying to write what he remembered the original prophecies to be in various ways, to see if any of them would "stick" First on paper (immediately changed); on paper, weighed down by metal (changed); written indoors in a wood frame house (changed); written in a cave he was hiding in (changed... but only after he left the cave) ... Wait, what was that? What was special about that cave? Ah, it had veins of iron ore in the walls?! Whoa... Well if it was the metal that made the difference, how about writing it directly on metal in the first place?

Not gonna lie, occasionally I had fun constructing a scene in my head where that one king from 1,000 years ago got frozen out of a lerasium bead for some petty reason of Rashek's, like taking too long to come around. King10: All right, Rashek, I've reconsidered your offer, and have decided it's too attractive to pass up. (Kneeling) I will join my nation to yours, and swear fealty to you as The Lord Ruler. Rashek: That's right, I'm The Lord Ruler to you now, don't you ever call me Rashek again. EVER. Your service is accepted, and your house shall be Great in my Final Empire! King10: Yes, Lord Ruler! Thank you, Lord Ruler! (bows deeply, waits expectantly) Rashek: Well? Why are you still here? King10: Ah, well, you see, when you got all of us kings together in a room yesterday and offered us positions of power under you if we would be the first to kneel, well, Eric Kell and Haestentz agreed immediately, and this morning I saw them flying - Rashek: Yes, those who supported my rule immediately were given great power. I call it Allomancy. I made them dominant! King10: Umm... That was... Just yesterday.... Rashek: Sorry, I'm all out of upgrades. King10: What? Rashek: You heard me. The Allomancy Dispensary is no longer open for business. Bye-bye! Walky-walky out the doorie for King10! No magic powers! King10: But... But --- Rashek: Do you dare to retract your fealty to my face?! (Begins Steelpushing King10 out the door) NARRATOR: King10 kept whining to TLR, and eventually, was made into the first Inquisitor to shut him up.

Or perhaps the tenth noble house was founded by one of Rashek's children, because (which blew my mind) there's a WoB that Rashek did indeed father some after becoming The Lord Ruler. But you'd think that house (and the other houses) would remember that house as being special. But I see your point, there's no reason to assume the "nine original Allomancers", even if referring to mortal, non-Rashek ones, are the founding basis for all the ten last-stage FE "Great Houses" a thousand years later. The first explanation of that term in TFE reads: So there could well have been just nine, or indeed eight, original lerasium-eaters who founded noble houses that branched/split over time, settling into the list of ten most prominent ones by Vin and Elend's time.