Norlick27

Defending Elysium makes mention of humanity making first contact with the aliens in 2071, with the Phone Company seeming to have discovered Cyto 10 years prior. DE itself takes place 140 years afterwards, making it sometime between 2210 and 2212, depending on whether the two events here took place in the earlier or later parts of their associated years. One of the interior art images says that Skyward takes place "83 LD (Landfall Date)", presumably when the Defiant and its fleet crashed. M-Bot deactivated 172 years before 83 LD, or 88-90 PLD (pre-Landfall Date). The actual time M-Bot crashed depends on how much spare power M-Bot had to keep his systems running, since there probably was a period between the crash and deactivation. Anyway, that's all the math I could do, since we don't know what year on our calendar 0 LD corresponds to.

M-Bot makes Shakespeare (Hamlet) references in the scene where they're shooting rubble as target practice.

Not sure if it's the Sibling or some other spren being referenced here, but this WoB might be relevant: wiresegal In OB, you explained that the Singers have four sexes. I was wondering... Can the Singers have genders other than those four, like humans? Even as simple as just not going with male, female, or malen/femalen. Could a transgender Singer use their ability to shift forms to change their biological reality? And, finally, could a Spren be non-binary, if it wasn't personified in a typical male/female way? Brandon Sanderson In the cosmere as a whole, a person's perception of themselves has a lot of power over both their Spiritual and Physical forms. It is possible, with investiture, to change their biology to match Cognitive perceptions--and while this could be easier for some races (like the Singers) it's not outside plausibility for any race. There are non-binary spren, actually--and you should be meeting one important one quite soon in the books. source

So, I was rereading Edgedancer when I spotted several references to Lift's mother I missed the first time. I don't know if there's already another thread on this, but I couldn't find one. Anyway, here we go. I think the loss of her mother and the subsequent things she went through as a result might be how Lift was "broken", allowing her to have the potential to form a Nahel bond. There's this WoB that says that there was loss involved in her visit to the Nightwatcher. From Chapter 5: From Chapter 15: From Chapter 17, where Lift is in a group of urchins: From Chapters 10 and 17, where Wyndle asks why she acts the way she does, and Lift later responds: And finally, the interlude in Words of Radiance: I think that originally, Lift lived with her mother, who she describes as a kindly, loving person, and that Lift was happy during those early years. Then, her mother got sick, and Lift, for some reason, didn't take care of her properly (or at least she perceived it that way). Eventually, Lift's mother died, and she became a street urchin. At first, she struggled with surviving, but eventually got better at it. During this time, Lift started trying to distance herself from other people in an effort not to get attached, so that she wasn't responsible for their welfare and therefore couldn't be hurt if she let them down. Sometime during this period, she couldn't take doing the whole "being cold and uncaring and emotionless" thing full-scale anymore and visited the Nightwatcher, asking to have her aging stopped. I guess this was an excuse for her to continue to run around flippantly without caring too deeply for anybody (since theoretically, she could say that since she's eventually going to see them die or something, there's no point in developing a relationship). I think her progression as a Radiant is supposed to help her learn to care again, kind of like how Kaladin's is about giving protecting another try. If I missed anything, please let me know. Thanks!