I think I am here.

3 minutes ago, MacThorstenson said:

You're right. But I just had an epiphany, Kelsier held the shard of preservation for a while, and thus would know what his godmetal did, no? I think that he wouldn't know about the rest of the metals instinctively, but he would know about what his metal did.

I can see that.

1 minute ago, MacThorstenson said:

My guess is that they may have had a little help from harmony in filling out this table.

Doesn't Harmony disapprove of Hemalurgy though?

11 hours ago, Sterling said:

This also explains the "might steal destiny" part. The author of the table (in book not Sanderson) isn't sure. They're research isn't conclusive.

So then how would they know what lerasium does? Seems odd that they're not sure about chromium but are sure in lerasium, a god metal which is only available in a few small beads which have probably been removed with the remaking of the world.

5 hours ago, xinoehp512 said:

So wait - does Aluminum remove the powers of the person it is spiked into? Is it permanent, or only as l

Well, all of the spike description say what they would do to the victim of the spike (eg. Stealing strength or stealing senses), so following that logic the spike would remove the powers of whoever it was spiked from. Once it's charged, I'm not even sure if the spike would be useful anymore. It doesn't steal powers from the victim, it removes them.

2 minutes ago, Voidus said:

See the weird part is that we know that seeing the future in the cosmere isn't completely reliable, especially the further into the future you go you can only see possibilities, not a single predefined destiny.
So does Chromium steal simply your possible futures? Or a single possible future? Or does it have access to something more reliable than Shardic future sight?

Good point. Because if it took all of your futures, then one of them would be to be spiked. And if you were spiked with it and survived (seeing the chart, if you were spiked in the wrist bindpoint you could survive), then what would you be? How would you live if all of your futures were taken? Would you just seize to exist?

So I think it might be stealing a single future. But then, how do you make it so specific? How fo you differentiate between becoming the Hero of Ages and  becoming the Hero of Ages except you didn’t eat that one cheesecake in that ball.

1 hour ago, Voidus said:

It could just be that the actual effect is less clear. I mean if you did spike someones destiny into yourself how would you be able to tell? Whereas all abilities being spiked into you would be pretty obvious even though Lerasium itself is far rarer.

Another interesting point for me at least is that destiny isn't capitalized here, unlike Identity, Connection, Fortune.

That makes sense, unless you could see into the future you wouldn’t be able to know whether you’d actually stolen someone’s destiny.

The idea of destiny and how you can Spike it is really interesting to me. If somebody had spiked the destiny out of Sazed and put it in themselves, would they have become the Hero of Ages?

Might steal destiny.

Ok, he's just messing with us now .

But I find the 'might' so confusing. We know that this isn't some canonical mistake by the in world table makers because otherwise they wouldn't know what a lerasium spike would do anyway, so we have to assume this a perfect table, which means 'might' is true. What does this mean? Does it mean there's a chance of failure when using the spike?