robardin

My wife saw what I wrote about the cookieminds, and pointed out that that should mean the Inquisitor should be spiked not with steel spikes through the eyes, but, well, with some kind of cookie. Say, shortbread. And the entire Steel Ministry would then be the Shortbread Ministry. Haha!

Hm. So the storing of Investiture would be different from storing any other Feruchemical attribute into a metalmind? It would lack Identity - courtesy of the shunting to an aluminummind - but tapping different nicrosilminds would "interfere" with each other? OK, but that only explains the interference on usage, not the difficulty in creation. How come more than one kind of Investiture can be stored in the same aluminummind, unlike multiple senses in the same tinmind, as apparently is the case? And why is it only possible for a Fullborn to create something like the Bands? Well, let's see. The Bands of Mourning are composed of "16 bands of different metals melded together" into a spearhead, so if they grant all 16 Feruchemical and Allomantic powers, they must all be in the same nicrosilmind, and the other 15 bands are the pre-filled metalminds for the non-Nicrosil Feruchemical attributes. Maybe filling a nicrosilmind isn't like filling a specific sense into a tinmind, but storing the Feruchemist's entire "spiritweb" of Feruchemy (if I'm using that term right). Hemalurgy can only steal 1 of 16 Allomantic or Feruchemical abilities at a time with a spike, but in this case nothing is being "stolen", it's the Feruchemist storing his own mojo, and it stands to reason his mojo is an all-or-nothing type affair, that's part of what makes it HIS mojo. Shunt off the Identity portion of the mojo with the aluminummind trick, and now you're storing pure Full Feruchemy mojo without the nametag. As for the two-power medallions - unlike the Bands, they definitely store the powers in SEPARATE (multiple) rings. When Wax first talks to Allik about them, bolding mine: The "other ring" that "grants the warmth" must be another "separate ring" of nicrosil, granting the ability to tap the brassmind. Evidently it takes great skill to put two nicrosil rings with different kinds of Investiture so close to each other - even more for three, prohibitively so for four or more - due to "interference", yet using even two medallions interfere with each other. Because otherwise they wouldn't have to create 2 or 3 ring medallions in the first place, if the interference limited a person to using up to 3 Identity-less nicrosilminds at the same time, they could just do that with three separate medallions (each of one ring), right?

OK now I confess to being confused. I do remember you posting something along these lines, but unless it was in another thread I can't find it, because re-scanning the several posts you made above mine, I see you writing: "We don't know how" and "it's an additional process" and "however that process works, interference is caused if someone tries to wear more than one medallion", and "each medallion ... gives someone without nicrosil feruchemy the ability to tap it to get the Feruchemical ability to access the other section" (paraphrasing) is basically all I've come up with myself, as well. You then added a guess that "limited power which each medallion grants is keyed to each medallion" as a reason for multiple-medallion-wearing interference, which I don't get what you mean.

No, neither. It's a reasonable one but something feels off about it to me, I'll have to think about it when I have more time to encapsulate why. I think it's meant to be a little mysterious to us at the moment. Sorry, not ignoring you

Actually there's another description of the Bands, when Wax wakes up from his Walk With Harmony: Since the Bands also have pre-loaded Feruchemical metalminds, the nicrosilminds to grant the ability to tap them - and to grant Elend level strength Allomancy - must be overloaded in the same material. So, time for me to mentally adjust. Which Allik said was hard to do beyond 3 attributes, when passed between different people, but one person with all the powers could pull it off. So... How does that work?

The only description of what the Bands look like is when Marasi realizes the empty pair of bracers were a decoy, and that it was the spearhead Wayne removed from the statue: The way I'd imagined it working to store Investiture for Allomantic or Feruchemical ability was that a given nicrosilmind could only store one attribute at a time (similar to how tinminds aren't able to hold stores of different senses in the same metalmind), so I pictured the bands as thin and wavy, with LOTS of lines. Also why I thought perhaps it wasn't 32 bands but "only" 12-16 or so. If it doesn't work that way, then I'm confused about why Allik's people can't make medallions of arbitrary collections of powers, versus how the BoM was constructuted, versus why using multiple medallions at the same time don't work but the Bands allow for simultaneous tapping of multiple powers.

Hmm. I just remembered another unexplained limit of three that I didn't remember being mentioned before Bands of Mourning: when Suit mentions that their experimenting with Hemalurgy showed that they could give themselves a maximum of three spikes without being subject to Harmony's direct will. (For example, Suit made himself a Bloodmaker, Coinshot, and a Leecher.) Coincidence? And since Harmony, like Ruin, can speak directly to a Hemalurgically spiked human (Pathian earrings), it stands to reason he's able to talk to the self-enhanced members of the Set. If they're talking back, who knows.

Speaking of Kelsier "losing his memory" and that nicrosil/copper coin that Wax gets to tap to replay what appears to be a Kelsier-as-Nascent-Sovereign memory... 1 - Filling a coppermind with a memory actually "unloads" it, right? Like, Kelsier (presumably) doesn't have it in his own head as long as it's been pushed out into a coppermind? 2 - Now that Wax has tapped the nicrosil on the coin to temporarily become an Archivist, and then tapped the coppermind to replay that memory, ... now what? Did he retain enough Archivism from the nicrosilmind to put the memory back into the coin, or is the coin now just a coin, Wax just the same old Wax, but he has a bit someone else's memory in his head now? (That must be kind of a weird feeling)

Doesn't Saze say at one point that a Feruchemist couldn't store multiple senses in the same tinmind, like sight and hearing? Even though the Feruchemical metal/ability was the same, he had to have separate tinminds for them. I thought it would be kind of like that. You are right in that he does say that two Feruchemists can share different "sections" of the same metalmind (each sensing, but not being able to access, the attributes stored by the other). But that just makes it even more curious that they can't make a pass-around version of the Bands beyond the count of three attributes. Nor explain why one cannot use 32 one-attribute medallions (each with their own separate band of nicrosil) created by 32 different people creating Identity-less nicrosilminds to (temporarily) become a Lord Ruler equivalent, but using a single artifact (the Bands) created by a single person would work. Allik seems to understand the distinction, but I don't. I mean, I get the inverse statements, that "32 separate nicrosil medallions are easy to create, but impossible to use; but a BoM Grand Unified Nicrosil object is easy to use, but impossible to create except by a LR equivalent". Just not the basis for it. It's not based in Identity, so what? I like @Shadeshadow227's idea that there is some kind of residual Connection in these metalminds, even after they've had the Identity factored out of them, but I think this is meant to be one of the mysteries we're left with after reading Bands of Mourning. Unless I'm missing something and there IS a coherent explanation to be found in the information we've already been presented with.

Also that a two-attribute medallion (like the Weight and Connection medallions they used to talk and to take off in the escape pod) is less common than the single attribute ones (the heat medallions); that they cannot create medallions with more than three attributes, as that would take a full Feruchemist (which evidently they don't have); and that the standard way they create the two- and three-attribute medallions is to pass them between Ferrings. So what they have, exact mechanism as yet unkown, is: A way to add both Feruchemical nicrosil (Investiture) and aluminum (Identity) ability to a Ferring of a diferent metal (e.g., a Firesoul who can store/tap brass) This Firesoul Ferring (as an example) now takes some aluminum, and a medallion with both brass and nicrosil in it Fill the aluminummind with Identity at the same time as filling the brassmind - that causes the attribute stored in the brassmind to lose its Identity tag that ordinarily would make it only usable by him/herself (can now be used by any Firesoul Ferring). I guess the metalmind-bound Identity can only go down one pipe, so to speak. Now fill the nicrosil part of the medallion with the Investiture representing your Firesoul ability (to tap/store in the brassmind), still filling the aluminummind to make it Identity-less Now done with the medallion, tap your Identity back from the aluminummind If you want to create a medallion with 2 properties, Allik describes them passing it along to another Ferring, who repeats this. The different attributes get added "with separate rings". What's interesting is that this is limited to "2, maybe 3" things in a single medallion, because they "interfere with each other", unless "you had all the powers, rather than adding yours to the medallion, then passing it to another" - that's the only way that Allik supposed you could break that limit. Which is exactly what the Bands of Mourning are supposed to be, 32 bands of nicrosil along with 16 bands of pre-filled metalminds*. (Too bad if you'd wanted that steelmind to SHED weight, I suppose!) The curious thing is that "interference" is also the reason Wax's initial (obvious) idea to just "strap 32 medallions to your body, and have all the abilities" doesn't work. Which Allik said was a limitation due to interference not in creating, but in USING the medallions. Why would wearing multiple medallions not work, but using the Bands does, if the nicrosil stores are truly Identity-less either way? *I actually suspect the Bands don't grant "all 16 Allomantic and all 16 Feruchemical powers", that that's an exaggeration, it just grants a whole lot of them. No basis for this though.

But isn't this limited to how much brass you have got? Eventually the brassmind will fill up. Sazed mentioned that his little rings couldn't hold very much. On the other hand it seems brassmind storage is very efficient, meaning even a small brassmind (like the medallions we see in BoM) can store enough body heat to last a person for quite some time. Or maybe "firefighter" Firesoul Ferrings just walk around with their big brass... plates.

Yeah, I found it as a link: www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=632#1 So what people mean is that the Allomancy genes interfere with the (full) Feruchemy genes, not in a way that makes combining Feruchemy with Allomancy impossible (obviously not), but that genetic ability for Allomancy somehow "shards" the Feruchemy ability into Ferring-style expressions of Feruchemy. And that the reason we hadn't seen them before on Scadrial, either in the Final Empire or the "Classic" era before it, had to do with the isolation of the Terris Feruchemist population from the non-Terris people (first by mountains, then by pogrom and breeding programs).

Right, and it's a deep fear of something that is rooted in your pre-Epic life, so it couldn't ever be a fear of losing your Epicness. (I was just messing around anyway.)

What if, as FDR suggested, the only thing the Epic feared was fear itself? That can't work, really, because surely one thing every Epic fears at some level is losing their powers, so if just being afraid of losing your powers would lose you your powers, you're kind of in a pretty bad place.

I would think that Feruchemy prevents one from emptying all of one' Identity into an aluminummind, just as you can't (per WoB somewhere) realistically put 100% of your health or heat into a metalmind, because you'd immediately die. Otherwise a Nicrosil Ferring (with no hemalurgic or other add-ons to give them other Feruchemical abilities) would have a potentially one-way storage of their Investiture. Hey, I'm a Soulbearer, lookit me, I can put my ability to tap nicrosil into this here bit of nicrosil, and now I'll just tap it to draw it back out and, oh Rusts, that was all of it, wasn't it? Creating a medallion is a side effect of filling a nicrosilmind while also filling a different metalmind at the same time; the bit of the Feruchemist's Identity that would normally flow into the metalmind to key it to the Feruchemist is instead going to the nicrosilmind, leaving the metalmind filled with its attitribute stored without Identity. It doesn't (have to) mean ALL of the Feruchemist's Identity.

Well it would have been a bit of a spoiler for Moorcock to have said, "It'll make you give your breath away!" And a little creepy on top of that to say on the cover, "An exceptional tale... Brandon Sanderson, my breath become yours!" I guess he ran out of space to make a comment about how he appreciated the lack of off-color jokes in the book.

That's kind of the point I was trying to make, though. I was using it as an (counter)example as to the repeated statements that confused me earlier. Blast it, I can't figure out how to multi-quote, but Spoolofwhool wrote this on the first page of this thread (bolding mine): And other posters seemed to take it as something of a given. But If TLR was concerned about a stacked/compounded person being naturally born with both Allomancy and Feruchemy during the Final Empire era, and we also see naturally occurring Twinborns - including same-metal Compounding Twinborns - in the post-Catacendre era, how is that true? Where is this idea coming from?

That is a sentence I don't think I ever expected to read in this particular area of the Internet. Where is this about the "conflict" in the sDNA for being both Mistborn and a Feruchemist coming from? I don't recall reading that. Because obviously the traits for Allomancy and Feruchemy don't conflict such that that Twinborn are naturally occurring, nor is it a case where "as long as the metals don't overlap", as a Twinborn Compounder (gold) like Miles Hundredlives was naturally occurring as well. Also, if this is something Spiritweb related, would it not be something Rashek would have understood while holding the power of Preservation? He saw enough to realize creating beads of lerasium would create full Mistborns. If he knew it would be impossible for Feruchemists to breed with Mistborn to produce a "natural" Fullborn, he wouldn't have had to resort to transforming his friends (along with all living Feruchemists) into mistwraiths/kandra, nor to institute the repressive and abusive "breeding programs" on his own Terris people, "out of fear that someday [a Fullborn] could be born to challenge him". Unless this is all an as-yet-unknown-to-me WoB somewhere that mentions Sazed fiddling with things upon Ascension, along with restoring chromium or nicrosil to the Allomantic Misting pool in lieu of atium, changing the mechanism of Snapping, and possibly, enabling the theretofore-unseen phenomenon of Ferrings?

This is a really cool line of thought. On a much simpler one though, also prompted by "ettmetal + water = boom" and what that paralleled in our so-called "real" world ;), the obvious question is, "what is left after the reaction?" Using the Cesium example, the chemical equation (that I looked up) is: 2Cs(s) + 2H₂O(l) → H₂(g) + 2Cs⁺(aq) + 2OH⁻(aq) So, you mix solid cesium and liquid water, get a big boom, and are left with some hydrogen gas, Cesium ions, and hydroxide ions. Is it possible on Scadrial that while harmonium may not be (easily) separated into lerasium / atium, the "ionic leftovers" of such a reaction might be? (Too simple, of course, for the positive and negative "ions" from adding water to harmonium were themselves lerasium and atium, or the Southern Continent would be replete with unstoppable full Mistborn warriors.) Since the title of the next Mistborn book is projected to be "The Lost Metal", we may soon find out.

That depends on who the agent is...

I meant you'd need at least one "extra" Breath to do Awakening, unless you wanted to become a Drab... But more fundamentally, just saying "my Breath to yours" is not enough, you have to mentally frame the Command of giving your Breath to someone else. And how does that idea enter someone's head in the first place? As for instinctive Awakening with more Breath - that is interesting - a Returned only has one Breath, but it's a "divine" one, enough to reach the Fifth Heightening all on its own, but it still only lasts the one week. Is that "higher quality" enough to make Awakening more instinctive? I always thought of it as "having extra Breath (than baseline) made it easier", but if Heightening alone were it, that would make sense. That would still count as Endowment setting things up for Awakening, too.

Instead of dropping a bucket of molten aluminum onto the TLR, what about dropping him into a whole LAKE of the stuff? Would he go down like the T-1000 in Terminator 2? Make it a wooden room so he can't Pull himself out. I'd imagine all the molten metal would be doing some pretty heavy and constant damage to his health.

That is a good point - Awakening was only discovered when the current people of Hallendren arrived, right? Displacing the former residents to Idris, with Pahn Kahl on the short end of both situations (from their POV)? Yet the Returned pre-date even that, as Vo the First Returned founded the dynastic line of Idris. And, think about it, given what we know about its mechanics, how could Awakening be "discovered"? You have to have quite a few Breaths before it's even possible, and to acquire more than your own natural one, someone has to know the basic Command "my breath to yours", with the intent in mind to transfer their Breath to you. It seems highly unlikely for people to just be sitting around one day, and both to conceive of having transferable Breath and then to say that. Where did that information come from? And its timing is relatively recent. Add to that the fact that the Five Scholars quickly progressed to fairly advanced Realmatic understanding, despite Awakening having what looks like the highest hurdle to beginning to Do Stuff With Investiture of any magic system we've seen in the Cosmere, regardless of the relatively simple mechanics. The most obvious candidates are either Endowment sparking the discovery via a Returned with embedded information in their unconscious - maybe one of the Five Scholars, or all of them - or some worldhopping meddler of a Realmatic Theory guru coming in, figuring it out, and dropping knowledge on the locals. (You'd think this would be Hoid, but if you take his comment about how nice it was to have perfect pitch when tuning his "guitar" in WoR as implying he only recently acquired it, that would seem impossible since Vasher/Zahel and Nightblood are on Roshar at the same time and have been around for hundreds of years already. Though Hoid apparently doesn't move through time the same way as everybody else.) I prefer the first theory, anyway, because otherwise what's Endowment doing?

Huh. OK, guess I was barking up the wrong tree on this one That is one detailed WoB dump. I'll have to read the archives more closely. I thought I'd read them all, but don't remember that one. Actually I maybe read it too early, before reading the Stormlight Archive books, maybe even before Elantris, and it just went over my head. (I remember finding stuff here after reading just Mistborn and Warbreaker, and wondering who this Hoid guy was everybody was talking about...) So Awakening is a magic tied to the quality or source of Investiture, being BioChromatic Breath, which is unique to Nalthis? And "[Odium] didn't want [the combined Shardic power of Aon/Dor] to gain sentience [after Splintering Devotion and Dominion], as Investiture will do if it is left alone". Innnnteresting.

Not sure why I can't edit my aborted quoted post above, even from a desktop computer... I think those "tears" (the liquid found in the marshy plants near Hallendren) are the condensed form of Endowment's power, and that Awakening is a magic that needs (a) someone from Nalthis Invested with enough BioChromatic Breath to animate and Command whatever it is they are intending to animate, which is the "breath of life" to the object that can be reclaimed, and (b) some Tears of Edgli to effectuate the transformation (the one time cost). I think the "needs color" ingredient of Awakening is something of a red herring (ha ha), or rather, an incomplete herring. It's really that most, or all, of the colors in fabrics on Nalthis are made with dyes from the Tears of Edgli. When dyed objects from other sources don't work for Awakening, they just ascribe it to not being "vibrant" enough - but "vibrancy" really is about containing "Essence of Endowment". Meanwhile, we've got numerous implications and cites from WoB that Rosharan Stormlight can be used as a substitute for BioChromatic Breath in terms of sustaining Vasher as a Returned. And that Vasher has tried Awakening stuff on Roshar, like maybe with a Kholin deep blue cloak, to no success, when maybe all he needed was to try it with color from something from Hallendren.