MacThorstenson

But thats stormlight, we know that humans as a whole are bad containers for stormlight. It does stand to reason that while humans can only hold a certain amount of investiture, holding stormlight and tapping a metalmind are not equal. There is never mentioned a limit on what you can tap from a metalmind, and its not regarded as dangerous. Infact, fullborns are so powerfull because they can tap as much as they want whenever they want. Stormlight is different in that it physically affects the body and is constantly trying to escape. No I read that. The thing is, stormlight can't heal from something that kills you, we have a quote from kaladin saying that a severed spine couldn't be healed via stormlight. Progression can, but you can't use progression on yourself once you are dead. You would have to be actively using progression on yourself as you got stabbed, which takes concentration. Gold compounders can heal reflexively. Also, gold compoounders dont need to eat or sleep because they heal the damage being done to their bodies as hit happens. If you store heat while you walk through a fire you become fireproof.

I think you severely underrate them. Gold compounder's can come back from decapitation. You could blow them up and they would still heal back. It's really hard to kill them. Stormlight can't heal from a shardblade wound to the spine, but gold compounders probably could, they can heal shardblade wounds and can survive beheading. I do disagree with your ranking for the levels, and think that generally the current ranking of metals is good. Cadmium, Copper, Gold, and malatium I could see being lowered a little for allomancy, but besides that I think that the current system is good. Bronze could definitely be very useful, and I think it should be worth more than 5. Same with cadmium, electrum, and copper. Brass is definitely worth at least 30, because if you store warmth in the right amount you could walk through a fire unharmed. Duralumin I could see being a little lower, Atium I think its at least 20. Tin is definitely 30+ because you could store the sense of pain. The other ones are mostly good, but I think gold would be a little higher. But what he's saying is that those shouldn't provide any less points as people would still be able to use all 16 metals and have access to them in the alleyverse.

The scientist spiking the man continued to do so.

"OK." Mac said, returning the nod to Lita. He bagan warping the tables and vials of blood to the cleaning department. Once he was done he turned to the wall, and he looked through the wall into the alleys. He saw all of them. Every single one. Even the ones that most people didn't consider alleys, like the alleys in between atoms and molecules. The small alley in between an bed and a nightstand. Every single one. He saw it all and understood it. Then he calmly picked up a fractal alley and moved it infront of him. He took a step forward and into the alley. All someone watching would have seen was a guy go from existing in 3 dimensions to 1.58 And disappear.

"No, they shouldn't. These don't mess with identity enough to impact your ability to fill metalminds, and your ability to burn metals shouldn't change at all. Now, if there is anything else you would like to know, now is the time to ask it. Otherwise, I will take my leave now." Mac started to clean up the blood and spikes. "I will be in contact when I have a job for you." @ZincAboutIt

Very true. I agree with @Steel Inquisitive that I think that we have enough things put in place to start actually RPing. At the very least we should start coming up with a plot and finalizing characters.

Mac was incredibly confused about how a man had made it into his office without Mac's permission. Mac warped a solid aluminum box around the man to be dealt with later. After Lita had lied down, Mac reached into the blood jar and pulled out about 20 thumbtacks. He chuckled to himself as he placed them on Lita's forearms. He shouldn't joke like that, but it was fun. Once each tack was in place, he tapped it in with the large railroad spike. When all that was done he pulled out a few mental stability thumbtacks to keep the weakness from showing. "There you go." He said. "How does it feel?" @ZincAboutIt

"Excellent." Mac said cheerfully. "Now don't worry, these spikes are pretty small compared to normal size." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a metal spike twice the size of a railroad spike. "If you could please lie down on your stomach. These spikes are going to go into the underside of your forearm. Each spike on its own doesn't actually have a bind point there, but once we stab you with 5 or more of these spikes the sub-spinal bindpoints shift to your...." He continued rambling on about the science as she lay down on her stomach. @ZincAboutIt

I completely agree and would add that considering that the gods are actually real, if they wanted too they could strike someone down in an heartbeat, so the fact that they haven't set up a theocracy says enough about their desire to rule.

Mac grinned. Now was his favorite part. "Great! And it was my pleasure, I enjoy teaching alleytravel to people. Now, its time for the fun stuff." Mac pointed to the other side of his office and a hemalurgy table appeared along with a jar full of blood. "If you could, please seat yourself at the table."

Sounds good.

I feel like at most it would be like a powerful union. At its core magic is a career. You can go to different levels, and use expertise from magic in other careers, but at its core its a career, so any political influence it would have would be based off of that. EDIT: I will probably change Mak a lot. I'm going to change him into an enchanter with a specialization in making enchanted cookies. In addition I'm going to make an NPC that is the Local DA leader.

I would hazard a guess at no, mainly because the core part of natural magic is that it is belief based, and belief and perception is what the entire cognitive aspect is. But I don't know. I would assume that extremely complex ritual spells could create illusions. Actually that could be another branch of ritual magic, illusion crafting. It would directly affect photons and not the atoms and molecules. Definitely. I can think of a number of things that one could do on a large scale given enough crystals.

Several members of the DA contingent started chuckling. In order to make a law to govern a group you had to be able to control that group first.

On the topic of gender reassignment spells, I’m not sure if those would be a thing in world as they would require an extremely advanced biological knowledge. For true gender realignment surgery you would need to change the DNA itself. Brain chemistry altering rituals would also require an extremely advanced knowledge of anatomy. So while both of these would technically be possible I don’t know if people would be able to actually do them. Magic should generally be illegal if it is affecting other people without their permission. In terms of how careful the academy is, it would depend on what part of the academy you are a part of and how you are there. Is the DA paying you to learn to be a mage? Are you a GB assassin on a mission? The academy itself shouldn’t have any legal or political power I don’t think. I also don’t think that there would be a mage council as a separate political entity. The mages would most likely be dependent on the government and the armies for maintaining control of the crystals. In addition, the combat ability of a ritual using mage is about equal to that of a swordsman, and they would need to spend a lot of money in order to have enough crystals on hand to fight with. In addition the only mages that know enough to be threatening are the ones who know how to change their age. Those are the people who were around 60 years old before they started taking the advanced theory course. Most people don’t have the recourses or desire to spend most of their life learning when they could learn some useful tricks for their profession and then leave. So the vast majority of the students would be aged between 30 and 60, with maybe 7% of the entire university older than 60 mentally. As to the actual punishments, it would depend on the crime obviously, but most would result in death or brain death for the experienced ritual users. These people often can cast spell mentally with only the circles, and considering that one could even use a piece of string to make a circle it could be extremely dangerous to keep them alive. For the public, I think it would be similar to a scientist in our world. Like, I know a biochemist, I know vaguely what they do, I know where they work, but I don’t know anything about what they use to do their job, what it’s like to be a biochemist, or anything similar.

The Denizen looked up from where he was threading the spike through the mans cheek. "Uh right now we have just one. If you want to get someone go ahead, but I would suggest making sure that they are actually volunteers because we don't have proper restrainment equipment." The scientist shoved the spike through the cheek for the 10th time, then burn a little steel to see if it was any more invested. Nope.

Mac almost burst into applause. That was beautiful. Absolutely amazing. "Amazing." He said softly. There was nothing like teaching someone to alleytravel. It was like watching a kid walk for the first time, but way cooler. "Perfect! Do you know why what you were doing before was wrong? Because the alleys don't like to be tricked. They will change for you, because they have to. But if you are tricking them, they will make you suffer. But now we can get onto lesson 2, and can start adding supplements for you. These will be small spikes that take away some of the mental strain of alley travel. Let me explain why you need them. He paused them opened up a door from nowhere to his office. Once they were all inside, he shut it and sat down. "The alleys, as you might have guessed, have a lot of variability." He started. "Some areas are safer, while others are more dangerous. Some alleys can be walked through easily, others will drive you insane. As such, when you travel you either need to know exactly what alleys you need to take, or you need to mentally specify all of the possible dangers that you could encounter and that you want to avoid them. In addition you need to specify how long of a path you need to take, where you want it to go through, and 1000 other factors. These supplements change you slightly and force you to always have these things in your subconscious. They are a bit like training wheels, you keep them on so that you can safely use the alleys, then you start to remove them piece by piece when you remember to keep those things in your mind. They enable you to train yourself with the mental discipline to use the alleys more safely. Of course it all depends on what you consider a danger, but the main supplements keep you in alleys that are 3d, safe-ish from the void, and keep you on alleys that are empty. That totals to about 20 spikes. Even then you still need to make sure that you are choosing to stay on the path. With a few more mental stability supplements you can look around as you alley travel, but I would suggest avoiding that until you are a bit more... adjusted." Mac took a large breath. "That was a lot of rather boring information, but basically it sums up to, don't kill yourself. We are giving you training wheels so you don't do that. Any questions?"

The man yelled, "I got one!" Holding the man by the wrist he dragged him over to a table where he gave him a gold medallion and told him to start tapping when he was spiked. The scientist then took a iron and tin alloy and proceeded to spike the man via every conceivable spot, starting with his head and moving to his toes. The man started tapping the gold medallion and thus healed every time.

"And you intend to enforce that via a useless hunk of metal, your gun, and a bunch of portals? Good luck." Then the man asked a another person if they would like to be a part of the experiment.

The man turned around and looked at AJ and sighed. He pulled another spike out of his pocket and resumed his search for a willing test subject.

The man look put out. "Fine." He turned and walked away to ask someone else.

One of the DA members approached AJ threateningly, carrying a large spike. "Excuse me sir, would like to be test subject 001 for our experiment attempting to locate the bindpoints necessary to increase ones ability to blow raspberries? You would be given a lifetime supply of cookies as compensation."