digitalbusker

I don't think it's Kelsier; from what I understand he could only give advice while Preservation was uncontrolled.

I understand that that's the prevailing wisdom, and I certainly don't have a Realmatic framework to explain how it could have been Kelsier, but who else is it going to be?

I am starting from the assumption that both of the voice-in-head incidents I quoted above were external entities "speaking" to the character in question. So, who or what was speaking?

Ruin speaks to people in their heads sometimes, but only if they're mentally unstable or spiked, which leaves Elend's example out, and only works for Sazed if the rings piercing his abdomen count. Also I'm not really sure why Ruin would want to save either of those characters, although it's clear from Marsh's behavior that Sazed's death wasn't a priority.

If Kelsier gained the ability to speak to some people in some way once he was holding Preservation's power, that implies that Preservation could also do that, so maybe it was Leras. But why didn't Leras do that while trying to communicate with Elend in HoA? (Maybe after Ruin was freed the balance tipped enough that he could stop Preservation from doing that, or maybe what was left of Preservation wasn't smart/strong enough to do that any more?) Or really, if Preservation could speak to Elend, why not say "Releasing the power at the Well will free Ruin, Mistsickness is Allomantic Snapping, and the people who are sick longest are Mistings who can burn Atium, which b-t-dubs is Ruin's body which he'll totally be looking for if he does get free--also don't say any of this out loud b/c Ruin is totes listening in on you. Oh! ProTip: he can read and change written materials unless they're inscribed in metal, kthxbye." If it was Leras/Preservation, it still seems likely that he was passing along things Kelsier told him to say, lacking the presence of mind to come up with more detailed messages based on stuff Kelsier didn't know yet.

Those were, unfortunately, not coins, a voice seemed to whisper.

But wouldn't that imply that it would be crazy easy to find a kandra? If anytime you Soothe a kandra you get the sensation of a wall, and anytime you Soothe a human you feel nothing, couldn't you just Soothe everyone until someone felt like a wall?

Sure you could, if you knew about that phenomenon. We know the kandra don't want it getting out, for obvious reasons, and I suspect the Lord Ruler would have tried to suppress that information too, because if it were commonly known then kandra infiltrators would not be as useful and they wouldn't be able to charge as much atium for their services. Whatever the reasons, it's clear that by Vin's time this was not common knowledge among Allomancers. That implies that you wouldn't stumble on the wall sensation accidentally (see earlier comments about Breeze, Kandra Finder Supreme). Presumably to hit the wall you have to be Pushing or Pulling on the kandra hard enough that you'd be exposing yourself if you tried it on a human. I'm talking about the kind of "I am manipulating you openly to show you how powerful I am" that Vin pulls a couple of times.

Especially if Tarson really is Koloss-blooded, and that's not some Roughs slang for "he's a bad dude, like a koloss".

Tarson's koloss blood is definitely not a metaphor.

He had a faint Roughs accent and a solid--though not tall--build, with bulging forearms and a mottled, grayish complexion, almost as if his face were made of granite.

Koloss blood, Waxillium thought.

He was squat and tough, but not very tall. He was only in his twenties--like all koloss-blooded, he'd continue growing....

When Vin was looking for the kandra spy in WoA and learned that kandra were immune to emotional Allomancy, she didn't think that was likely to be super useful, so at least she's not expecting any return data from normal Soothing or Rioting of somebody. I can't recall off hand if Breeze knew there was probably a kandra spy among them, which is too bad, because I'd trust his understanding of Brass more than Vin's. Not to mention, if there were some kind of feedback when you try to Soothe (normal Soothe, not brainhacker-Soothe) somebody, you'd expect Breeze to find all the kandra.

So, no, I don't think there's normally any feedback from emotional Allomancy, and the "pushing against a wall" sensation is unique to taking control of Hemalurgic constructs.

Only one way to win a knife fight against a guy with a sword... Elend thought, gripping his knife. The thought, oddly, hadn't come from one of his trainers, or even from Vin. He wasn't sure where it came from, but he trusted it.

Close in tight as fast as possible, and kill quickly.

Those weren't coins, a voice seemed to whisper.

The thought rattled in his dying mind.

The bag Marsh shot at you. Those weren't coins. They were rings, Sazed. Eight of them. You took out two--eyesight and hearing. You left the other ones where they were.

In the pouch, tucked into your sash.

I have always assumed that both of these passages are Kelsier intervening. It just seems like the kind of advice he'd give, and it reads to me like his voice (and maybe more importantly, definitely not Elend or Sazed's voices).

Granted, it's a little odd that he knows what senses the two tin rings were storing, but if he was watching closely it shouldn't be that hard to work out from context.

(If I remember correctly)

Being unsure of your memory is not of the Lethani.

Awesome! I wonder why their food is flavored differently? Brute force to men and delicacy to women makes sense to me...but why is their food different?? I admit, it boggles me.

I too have no interest in stepping into a debate about the origin and utility of traditional gender roles, but as a thought exercise, what do you think somebody in Alethkar would say were the biological reasons for women's food to be spiced differently from men's?

Upvote for putting "Captain, we cannot fire while Mistcloaked!" in my head.

"These are the voyages of the starship Elendel..."

USS* Vindication, surely.

*: United Scadrial Ship

And if you like that, watch the rest of the "true facts about..." videos. They are all funny

We should commission Ze Frank to do some Cosmere True Facts.

"Imagine you are a giant murder-crab stuffed full of money and you occasionally get the urge to just sit somewhere high and grow a mountain around yourself. That is how the chasmfiend do."

In any military action, it's stupid to work alone. You have much better chances of surviving with someone to watch your back.

Of course. That's the first law of the Roughs.

So here is my crack-brained, woefully-lacking-in-statistically-significant-evidence theory:

 

All ten Radiant Orders were paired with their mirrored order, based on the surge chart, and these order pairs consistently cooperated with each other to achieve their goals.

 

Discuss.

It's possible. The chart does seem temptingly symmetrical, although there'd have to be at least one vertically-matched pair among the horizontally-matched ones. What do we think Stonewards do? If they're using the surges of Surface Tension and Civil Engineering to create big earthworks on the fly in combat situations I can see how that would synergize with the Lashings.

Busker: You are a genius and meticulous.

At least one of those things is provably untrue, but thanks.

I like you and wish to discuss more things with you. If you are ever bored and/or have time, I would like to request that you click some of the links in my sig and give me your thoughts on some of my favorite pet theories. I suspect I will be fascinated by your insight.

I'll take a look.

Hmm I seem to have an unusual story...

I spent like a year and a half listening to Writing Excuses, hearing the others go on about what a fantastic writer Brandon is (I initially started listening because of Dan Well's serial killer books), and eventually decided I should read something of his. First I read was Mistborn, finished it over 24 hours or so and realised I *had* to read every other thing Brandon had ever and would ever publish.

**came in from Writing Excuses respect knuckles**

I started listening to Writing Excuses because I was a Schlock Mercenary fan. This was after the Wheel of Time announcement, but I'd forgotten the name of the guy tapped to finish it so I was a few months in before Brandon mentioned it and I said "Oh! I have to go read his stuff now, because based on the podcast I trust him and now I'm less worried about the Wheel of Time." But if I ever get a chance to attend a WE taping, I'm going to be sure to point out the fact that I read I Am Not a Serial Killer before I read Elantris.

My one thing I suppose... I think it's been WoB'ed that the coastline of Elendel is a place in the actual Final Empire, though all we know about the Final Empire's climes, really, is that it used to be magnetic north but far, far removed from true North... far enough to not experience abnormal day/night cycles. Luthadel supposedly rarely saw snow, but again, World of Ash, weather was freaky.

 

Dunno if that changes anyone's mind about temperate/what-have-you.

Far enough south for Luthadel--and probably the rest of the Empire*--to be below Scadrial's arctic circle, definitely, but who knows how much Rashek changed things when he held the power. We know Harmony moved continents around to match pre-Final Empire maps, but we don't know how far the Terris mountains (the original location of the North Pole) were from the coastline that now houses Elendel. From the two maps I place Elendel in what was the Southern Dominance, northwest of the ashmount Doriel and south of the ashmount Tyrian (now apparently a sea). But again that doesn't tell us anything about latitudes. We don't even know anything about Scadrial's climate outside of the Basin, really. When I first read AoL I tended, probably because of the Western influence, to read Feltrel as hot and dry, like the American Southwest (lots of dust, dry red clay ground), but it's in the Northern Roughs**, and since the prologue doesn't mention temperature*** and it seems like even people who aren't just trying to look cool wear dusters or other outerwear as a matter of course, it's probably more like, say, Utah.

 

Actually, come to think of it, the AoL map shows Elendel as being between 12 and 13 of whatever the relevant denomination of latitude is, so we should be able to compare the latitude lines to the scale to figure out how far it is from the geographic north pole (assuming it's at latitude 0) if we knew the latitude of the equator we could calculate the circumference of Scadrial, too.

 

Wait, no. I'm basing those numbers on the Steel Alphabet on the Coppermind, but the two northernmost latitudes on the map appear to be Malatium and Atium, which aren't mapped to numbers there. So the rest of the reasoning is flawed.

 

And I've now thread-jacked my own thread. We should get on that Allomantic Astrology thing, though.

 

--

*: Nobody mentions the northern parts of the Final Empire having "land of the midnight sun" phenomena, which is not conclusive.

**: I'm assuming the Elendel Basin is still in Scadrial's northern hemisphere, so northern regions would tend to be cooler.

***: Aside from the presence of an "old cold cellar," which I'm assuming is an underground place once used to keep things cool in summer, not a cellar that happens to presently be both cold and old.

Well Scadrial doesn't have a moon, so there wouldn't be an issue of lunar months messing things up. I'd expect the original (classical) Scadrial calendar to grow out of the seasons since they're the only repeating recurring phenomena in the right timescale. But Scadrial also has a relatively high number of apocalypses and activist gods, so by the time we get to the era of Vinuarch and Doxil, who knows?

Do we have the names of the months on Scadrial? Or even how many months in a year? (I would guess one of: 16 because Cosmere, 10 because metric, or 12 because inertia.)

 

Off the top of my head the only months whose names we know are Vinuarch and Doxil (both Alloy of Law era).

 

Vinuarch is in "early summer" (AoL Ch3).

Doxil is probably six months after Vinuarch.*

 

I don't recall any descriptions of winter weather during Alloy of Law, which mostly takes place in Doxil, which could be an argument against a 10 or 12 month calendar, but Elendel is a coastal city and I don't know that much about Scadrial's climate post-Final Ascension, so maybe they just have really mild winters.**

 

So, are there others mentioned somewhere? Elenduary, perhaps, or Spooktober? Or Marsh?

 

--

*: The Elendel Daily included in AoL is dated Doxil 4, and based on its description of the introduction of the Breaknaught it seems reasonable to assume that the main action of AoL all takes place in that month. When Wax is doing his initial research on the Vanishers' robberies he places the first robbery in Vinuarch and Tekiel's editorial three months after that, and "a few months back" from the present. Also, we know that six months have passed between Wax receiving the letter about his uncle's death and the beginning of his investigation into the Vanishers. It seems likely that Edwarn's faked accident and the first Vanisher robbery happened near the same time, as the Set started to advance their agenda in earnest.

 

**: I know the flowers in the central park bloom year-round, but Marasi seems to think they wouldn't without the hot springs underneath (AoL Ch10), so it's probably still in a temperate zone.

Luck certainly wouldn`t help in a straight fight. Just hitting someone with Atium seems pretty much impossible. No matter how lucky you are, you are still only going to punch at one spot the Seer used to be.

Unless they trip on a banana peel, or their shoelaces have come untied, or they dodge onto a rotten plank and fall down to the crocodiles.* Atium helps you figure out what you need to do (e.g. get out of the way of this blow), and it probably even helps you pick the best way to do it, but it doesn't help you actually accomplish it. Of course skill (and pewter, in the case of a Mistborn) help there, and a very skilled fighter is less vulnerable to bad luck than an amateur, but depending on how the tapped luck manifests, it could mess up even a Seer.

 

*: I'm assuming the standard rickety rope bridge over crocodile-infested rapids setting for this fight, obviously.

Maybe it's just because I'm currently rereading them, but the reveals in the original Mistborn trilogy stand out for me on this. Well, most of them, anyway. For me, finding out who the Lord Ruler really was was kind of "This guy we barely know turns out not to be this other guy we barely know, but actually this third guy we barely know... Okay?" Although it does make me feel a little guilty any time I give a friend the Mistborn elevator pitch "What if Frodo had kept the Ring?"

 

The Sazed/HoA/Harmony thing hit me hard because I really should have seen it coming. I'm still surprised that I was seriously considering Vin as the Hero after those first couple of epigraphs. The reveals related to Ruin's influence were more satisfying for me, both because I thought they really raised the stakes and because I didn't feel guilty about not seeing them coming.

 

The various twists in WoK don't have the same impact for me, mostly because it's just book one and I don't really expect to understand the world well enough at this point to be all that shocked. You have to lay a lot of pipe to earn a chapter like "A Visit from Verin Sedai". Though Sadeas's betrayal of Dalinar was pretty surprising on a metatextual level--we generally expect Our Heroes to be interpreting their divine visions correctly.

When downforeveryoneorjustme.com/17thshard.com is in your browser history.

...you can carry a TON of metal on your person....

Disclaimer: Do not attempt this.