robardin

That's right, Sazed did mention Bronze as one of the Allomantic metals whose Mistings "often" go savant. Which even at the time I read it kind of surprised me, since without a Coppercloud around to mask his Allomancy, someone like Marsh going around burning Bronze all the time would eventually catch the attention of an Inquisitor who was also burning Bronze. Unless Marsh detected the Inquisitor first and quickly "shut it down", but then, he could logically avoid that risky scenario completely simply by never burning Bronze. But that's for a skaa Allomancer, who were obviously rare - a noble-born Seeker could Seek without fear, in which case they might well be constantly on the scan out of paranoia, or looking to unearth the valuable information as to who else in which Houses were Allomancers. The only tough nuts to crack would be Copperclouds and full Mistborn.

Wasing the having of thinking!

I think we're maybe overthinking it a bit here. The comments above about how Marsh, at the height of his power, just before Harmony, had 22 spikes, and how the 8 steel spikes of the 22 total include 2 eye spikes when he clearly had one missing in the fight with Elend, I would read as loosely timed chronology-wise - not that "at the instant Sazed double-Ascended, Marsh already had 22 spikes, including replacing his missing eye-spike", and then inferring that that was only possible with Feruchemical Steelrunning. Because that would mean that Marsh, finally free of Ruin's control, had a first impulse to replace or augment his hemalurgic spike collection instead of simply being dazed while the world burned around him, or doing something more Marsh-like in terms of helping people get underground. I just don't see that as in character. Instead, I would choose to read that as a statement that "at the height of his power before Harmony" - i.e., the "Ruined Inquisitor" version of Marsh, as opposed to the free-willed but super-spiked Marsh - he had 22 spikes, which includes the eye-spike Vin pulled out (which was certainly "before Harmony"), and specifically NOT mentioning any spikes he replaced or acquired post-Harmony.

Several times in Warbreaker, it's mentioned and illustrated that the Returned do not recall their former lives, except dimly and subconsciously. Lightsong does not recognize his own brother serving as his priest, nor recognize in his dreams the niece he loved enough in life to sacrifice his life to save. Even Vasher, among the most long-lived and accomplished of any Returned, does not know even his own pre-Returned name (by his own account - maybe he was lying to Vivenna about that, for whatever reason). Yet Denth and Vasher both recall Shashara as Denth's "sister" (well, sister to VaraTreledees, which was Denth's name when Nightblood was created), and the other two of the Five Scholars - Arsteel and Yesteel - are described as "brothers". What's the deal there? My thought: the Five Scholars predate the Hallendren religious institutions built around the care and feeding of Returned Gods. Since it does happen that children, even infants, can and do Return, perhaps they were (small) children who died at or around the same time (by disease, accident, or something worse), were Returned, and were given back to their parents (or to adoptive ones) to be raised together? The emotional bonds evidently in play would seem to have to run a little deeper than being told "you know, you and Shashara were brother and sister before dying and Returning".

Well, their evilness to Nightblood aside, do the shades have Breath, or the local Investiture equivalent (like Stormlight)? 'Cause wielding Nightblood has a cost. I wonder if one could ever talk Nightblood into seeing itself as evil, and what would that do to it? I mean, it consumes the wielder's life-force. Anybody wielding it would eventually die, if they didn't stop. Since one of its primary metrics for determining "Is this person Evil?" is, "does this person want to use me as a means to kill other people?", you could write a very short logical proof that Nightblood Is Evil by its own metrics.

Actually, the timing of the F-Atium spike as "before the battle at the Pits of Hathsin" would make it Ruin's decision, not Marsh's. So there's no need to guess how Marsh would know which spike to take and where to place it - Ruin would be making him do it. There's no way Marsh could have gained control of himself enough to do an unauthorized Hemalurgic upgrade, especially after his "contribution" to Vin's Ascension by seizing control of his body for the fraction of a second it took to pull out her earring. Only if Marsh did it to himself, or had an accomplice do it, is the question pertinent: it would have to have been after the Catacendre - as it appears is the case with his left eye-spike - using the collection of Inquisitor spikes that were in the Cavern Formerly Beneath Kredik Shaw. I guess Marsh/Ruin had seen fit to move all the other Inquisitors' spikes, the ones that Vin slaughtered just before Ascending, into that traditional blood-jar storage cavern for TBA Inquisitor spikes. Can you give a link to Inkthinker's thread where it's shown that Marsh was F-atium'ed after Vin Ascended but before she took down Ruin (after Elend's death)?

How would Marsh have had the knowledge to pick out the right spike? The eye socket spike is one thing - they were probably the same for all Inquisitors, since all Inquisitors had two eye-spikes - so it would have to have been motivated by Ruin, whose motivations for giving any Inquisitor F-Atium are still murky, but why to give it to a non-Marsh one first - and then having Marsh harvest it after it lost charge - is doubly murky. I always thought Marsh had the most spikes of any Inquisitor because Ruin saw him as a kind of Queen chesspiece, his Swiss Army Knife of Inquisitors, and that he'd be first in line for any spikes - in which case it'd be a little odd for another Inquisitor to get a spike Marsh didn't have first, unless it was a matter of another Inquisitor being close to dying naturally of old age, where it was worth throwing atium compounding to him just to have him around at all. And yes, I was just re-reading SH this morning on the way to work, you're right that there is a ready source of all non-Marsh Inquisitor spikes...

So... At least one of the non-Marsh Inquisitors had an F-atium spike at the battle at Kredik Shaw, and Marsh later harvested it? Does that account for him replacing the eye-spike that Vin pulled out of him, too? But he fought with Elend outside the Pits of Hathsin while having only the one eye-spike, so that would mean he was able to get to those Inquisitor spikes after Harmony rearranged the world. Hmm. Bands of Mourning spoilers still in effect?

I like this angle. I hope Wayne and Marasi never become time bubble savants, that could be even stranger than a gravitational surge savant "going off of Investiture cold turkey". Or Allomantic electrum.

We do? How? I've always also wondered why Ruin would bother giving Inquisitors F-atium, unless they had captured so many Feruchemists that he could give all the Inquisitors the combat useful ones like gold, pewter, tin, steel, and iron (4 Feruchemists right there per Inquisitor). Only then would it make sense to look at the extra unspiked Feruchemists and say what the hell, let's make Marsh a Collector's Edition Action Figure and give him one of everything. That's kind of what I pictured since that way Marsh could survive his intended destruction of Scadrial, and then be a very useful agent in continuing to Ruin things elsewhere afterward.

Yes.

Two things to remember: one, there is a WoB around that Marsh is somewhere in the Southern Continent; and two, while Marsh (with all those spikes in him) would potentially be subject to the direct control of Harmony, evidently he is still able to operate independently, as he says himself at the end of The Alloy of Law while giving Spook's notes on hemalurgy to Marasi: "Harmony has particular views about how things must be done. I do not always agree with him. Oddly, his particular beliefs require that he allow that." What I want to know is how and where Marsh got his second eye-spike back. Vin pulled one out just before she Ascended, yet when Marasi sees him, he has two of them. It must have something to do with whatever Spook did prior to writing that book, and evidently something to do with (Bands of Mourning / Mistborn: Secret History spoilering still in order?) -

That's an interesting point I'd never realized. Not just that, with compounded bronze, a Fullborn could stay awake indefinitely... But that after a certain point, TLR would have to do that, unless one could tap a metalmind unconsciously, which we've seen no evidence of (and plenty to the contrary). I always imagined TLR was old in that scene due to his occasional need to refill an atiummind, because that's how Sazed initially explains Compounding at the end of Mistborn: The Final Empire: But there's no reason that would be necessary unless he'd tapped his atiumminds dry completely, which he couldn't afford to do after 1,024 years, right? Since burning a metalmind releases 10x of what was stored into it, you could: store 1x of health or youth in a metalmind, then eat and burn it, getting 10x of it back; then, use 2x of it to be healthier/younger than you are, while storing 8x into a different metalind, then draw on that metalmind as necessary. When it gets down to around 2x or something (maybe 3x to play it safe), eat only as much of the metalmind as has got 1x of Feruchemical attribute in it, burn it for 10x, store it back in the same or different metalmind. As long as you have a steady supply of the metal, you could recycle your own factored-up initial investment for 10x each time?

I agree that a skilled Seeker could tell who was the target of emotional Allomancy and, possibly, what type of emotion was being targeted (Marsh himself said as much in the first book). But isn't it already a somewhat rare thing for a Coinshot or Lurcher to be sensitive enough to the "feel" of the metal lines to be able to discern the composition of the metal (only Ranette has been mentioned as having that particular talent)? For a Seeker to feel that "through" the Coinshot/Lurcher, a second order sensitivity, seems unlikely.

I think it was more that it was obvious who the target was, once she realized the type of emotion being manipulated. Was it her realizing that Allriane was a Rioter, based on how she was twiddling (of all people) Breeze? (who clearly deserved it). EDIT: yeah, this was actually a great scene in WoA. From Chapter 36:

Does gold healing fix crazy, though? Mental health seems like something more of the cognitive than physical realm, if we're not talking neurological damage, anyway. I could see how paranoia about people legitimately being out to get him (especially while he was in the process of conquering the world to become TLR, way back when) led him to eschew sleeping for moments of drowsiness to store compounded wakefulness, leading to the paranoia getting worse, leading to hearing Ruin's voice all the stronger, telling him things that would make him (or keep him) paranoid (and awake). His extreme self-confidence seems akin to paranoia, as well.

That now make me think an interesting "prank" to pull on a Coinshot would be to slick an area commonly used for dropping coins, kind of like strewing banana peels around the corner of a corridor, or on a dark stairway landing. Or finding out a common landmark - like a large bronze statue of the Survivor - was a standard Coinshot anchor, and unscrewing it from its base or something. Ha ha!

I guess this is true. I was doing tests using a coin and my finger on a desktop surface that is fairly hard and smooth, but a coin in dirt or against rough pavement would behave very differently, as would the force resulting not from a finger's push but an Allomantic one that was counterweighted by my entire body's mass.

I only wrote that because I assumed the only way you'd ever be able to spike TLR would be while he was unguarded and unconscious - literally catching him napping. But as a fully compounding Allomancer/Feruchemist, he could take steps to avoid that, eh? At some point he'd have to store wakefulness in a bronzemind before burning it, just like Vin managed to catch him in the act of filling an atiummind, but I guess he could just be "kinda drowsy" for a bit and not full on fall asleep. Actually never sleeping would probably do things to his sanity, though which - oh wait.

I could see how being a Tineye would be of great utility to a sharpshooter, but not how being a Tineye would make it easier to become a good sharpshooter, if you get what I mean. Otherwise anybody with a good telescopic sight could be a sniper, which is clearly not the case. Though it could well be that a Tineye would be more highly motivated to develop sharpshooting as a skill that ideally complements their Allomantic advantage, that's entering the realm of discussing how much of being a good shooter is talent vs. practice. After all, I could push my basketball shooting skills to their max and still never play in the NBA.

I can't help think of this image now In Rod We Trust

Here's an interesting thought: we see increasingly difficult Commands being possible, or Commands becoming instinctive, with higher and higher Heightenings. Including the power to break Commands and to override Commands in Invested objects (the Eighth Heightening - as far as we know, only currently held by Susebron the God-King, and possibly only ever by Shashara and Zahaladasheralaxin the Warbreaking, Peacegiving Strifelover of a bad ardent). The most basic Command of all is the one to give up your own Breath to another: "my life to yours, my breath become yours". Even a one-breath baseline Nalthian is pre-loaded with enough Breath to do this. So, what if a high-level Command akin to Breaking or Overriding existing Commands... Was a Breath-stealing one, like "your life to mine, your Breath become mine"? Maybe that's how you get from the ~8,000 Breaths needed for the Eighth Heightening - already a massive collection - to the FIFTY THOUSAND PLUS Breaths that are in Peacegiver's Treasure, which remember, is largely what was LEFT OVER after creating Kalad's Phantom's and ending the Manywar. "Kalad" actually had way MORE Breaths than that when the war began. And Shashara even more, to Awaken Nightblood, and to propose making more like him (and I doubt she gave her Breath to Vasher when he killed her). It is pretty difficult to acquire huge amounts of Breath when each "rolling transaction" must be individually voluntary. It's easier to imagine if (as has been debated) Vasher and/or Shashara could hop to Roshar and collect Stormlight to use as Breath back on Nalthis. Or, if they could just out and out suck it out of people at will after a certain point.

Since we don't know the "loss ratios" involved with bursty type draws on Feruchemical storage, I've always imagined it as akin to something most of us would be familiar with IRL: fuel economy in a motor vehicle. Going slowly and steadily uses minimual fuel, while being aggressively bursty - like flooring it to redline to go 1 or 2 blocks between red lights/stop signs - is very wasteful. BUT, if you really, really want to get to that stop sign at the end of the block as soon as you goddamn can, every time, that's what you can do. It's not quite like the "bucket of water into a drinking glass" analogy to me, where the "waste" is represented as overrun or a "lost to the environment" type of loss, but more like "the cost of revving to redline". Like cars, different Allomancers/Feruchemists would have different cost/yield ratios as to how much they gain from being bursty, and how much is lost in the nature of their burst-draw. And who knows, just like an Allomancer can become "savant" in the efficient use of their power, perhaps a Feruchemist can "go savant" in the maximally precise burst-drawing of attributes their metalmind.

I forgot to add in hemalurgically stolen attributes in there - a "hemalurgic Misting", like Edwarn "Suit" Ladrian exhibits with in BoM - but that's largely dependent on the strength of the person the attribute was stolen from, minus a decay factor. What if you could spike TLR to steal one of his powers, how would that hemalurgic Misting rank? Probably pretty badass. Though imagine if at the critical decision point you confused Allomantic gold with Feruchemical gold, or (incorrectly) assumed you'd get his Twinborn compounding of a metal for free, and stole "his gold" only to find you'd killed(?)* the most powerful mortal being ever on Scadrial just to become a really, really powerful Augur. Good going, navel gazer. *If anybody could survive and heal being hemalurgically spiked while asleep, it'd be TLR