Master_Moridin

They're still "storing mass", they're just doing so through manipulation of Higgs field interactions. It can't be storing that interaction cause then that would have the exact same effect straight up storing mass should have. Either way, they don't store weight and Brandon has said they "store mass", but the whole mechanic of it is weird and breaks things.

This is the crux of the confusion though. In the quote we have, Brandon only mentions density. So the question becomes, did he specifically mean density, or did he mean two things of equal volume, but the one with greater mass would burn longer. It's a question of whether density or mass determines burn rate.

Relevant WoB

Crashers actually are storing their mass. In-world they just happen to not understand this so they say they're storing their weight.

Complete lack of anything backing this I can think of, but if the Investiture stored in nicrosil is done so in the form of a spiritweb, maybe it acts almost like a less invasive and less diverse version of hemalurgy, and touching the charged nicrosil connects the spiritweb in it to your spiritweb?

I actually brought this up in another thread. If we extrapolate bubbles absorbing (and for Cadmium presumably injecting) kinetic energy to doing so for the energy of light, it would fix the redshift problem quite efficiently.

And? That doesn't mean that a chunk of metal with the same mass but larger volume would burn the same length as a denser bead with the same mass but smaller volume. That very well could be what was meant, but it is not what was said, at least in the quote as it has been delivered to us. In the quote he addresses density, and says nothing about volume or mass specifically. If we had a more complete quote that actually stated the exact question asked and the entirety of Brandon's response this would be much simpler to come to a conclusion on.

Except that's not what Brandon said? Brandon said the piece with greater density would burn longer, presumably referring to compressing a chunk of metal into bead shape. "you would be able to burn [the denser bead] longer." doesn't have much wiggle room.

The statement you said "the dense bead would have the same burn length as the original-density block." means the same thing as "The dense bead would burn as long as the piece of metal would have before it was made denser." (dense bead = dense bead), (have the same burn length = burn as long as), (original-density block = metal before it was made denser) Which contradicts Brandon's statement that the denser piece would burn longer. Like, it does confirm that if you have two pieces of metal with equal mass then the denser one would burn longer. I was just confused because what you said it meant contradicted that, so I thought you had made a simple mistake so I asked.

Aren't these two statements contradictory??

What makes a person an Allomancer isn't their Connection to Preservation, it's the actual piece of Preservation in their soul. There's random scattered quotes that all talk about this, but I readily admit I have no idea where all of them are. Unless there was something explicitly mentioned in Secret History I'm unaware of that completely overwrote all the old stuff we'd been told.

Oops I always mix up those metals in my head

This is an odd question not sure quite relevant to this thread but: Where did the recent trend of people referring to Shardholders as Vessels come from? I've seen a couple of people use it and I'm just wondering if there was something said in something or other that I missed.

Hasn't, in a way, the question of redshift been answered in the Alloy of Law annotations? In them Brandon says that bubbles absorb the excess kinetic energy of objects leaving them. This could probably be extrapolated to apply to light as well, as a change in wavelength is roughly equivalent to a change in energy. For Cadmium bubbles I presume the effect would be reversed, with the bubble injecting extra energy to get things to where they should be

Shouldn't time bubbles be looked at as affecting local spacetime directly, and so aluminum shouldn't have any effect as the Investiture isn't being directly applied to it, or having to go through it?

This wouldn't work, because as mentioned in the original trilogy some of the Allomantic metals are actually toxic, and they have to be burned away so they don't poison the Allomancer from sitting in their stomach too long. Unless you mean they're changed on a chemical level, in which case I personally can't see that working either as all the metals somehow being chemically changed to be non-toxic seems...far fetched, and also there'd still be chunks of metal in the person's stomach that they'd have to...pass...later, which probably would have been mentioned.

I...do remember the answer though. That's what I was saying in my post.

In that case Stormlight Archives spoiler

Perhaps it's a matter of any innate Investiture related to the body itself still being active? Like, perhaps Returned are sort of...puppeteering their bodies? There's something from Stormlight Archive that might be relevant here but I'm unsure of cross-series spoiler policy...

Can't really answer the first question, but I can this. When you're burning to compound, you can take a portion of the power you get and store it in another metalmind. So it's sorta both. Fill a metalmind, burn it, and then take the compounded power and store part (or all) of it away to compound even more later whenever you want. It seems to be really tricky though to get the feedback loop working right though.

Allomancy does involve the Investiture entering the Allomancer though, just very much temporarily before it becomes an effect. This is how savants are created after all, the power widens the troughs in their spiritweb.

That entire WoB was him correcting something he had previously said in a previous WoB. The only reference to cognitive in that is in reference to the "It's full of stars" moment Atium uses the spiritual, and enough atium strength lets you peer straight into the Spiritual Realm Extra context:

Possibly because the mechanism by which memories are created is the same no matter the memory, but all your senses work differently?

So apparently we have a WoB that may give a clear answer to this. The physical atium itself is just normal matter.

This ignores though the effect the metal Vin burns is having on the Investiture she draws in. She isn't just choosing to burn a metal for access to power, the metal itself changes the power as it flows through/in/out of it. She chooses to burn iron, but the power she gets as a result is completely outside of her conscious decision and is a result of the interaction between the Investiture and iron. We have a WoB that says Atium lets one peer into the Spiritual Realm Quote