Oudeis

Are they not sleek? Are they not inhuman? I'm confused as to why this seems like such an impossibility. What about those words makes you think they can't refer to a chasmfiend?

I wonder how much of the text is going to change? Will descriptions of Kae be adjusted to reflect the new, more-accurate reality? Mistborn Spoilers

...How is "enormous figure" bigger than any chasmfiend? Wasn't the one he fought in the chasms like fifty feet tall? Is fifty feet not an acceptable value for "enormous"?

I always just figured it was chasmfiends. Many legs, huge, inhuman, there's already something like that in the chasms.

It has been stated by the Hero of Ages, in-universe, that feruchemy is of both; it's not simply something people believe. Also, it's explained to us in-universe, I believe by Ruin, that for a time there was no sapient life on the planet, so the terris could not have come from Yolen with them. The Hero tells us they made life "in a form in which they've seen". I would be surprised, but it's possible, that they made life on Scadrial but then also brought some Terris from somewhere else.

Do you have somewhere this quote from Brandon that hemalurgy is the most important art? I know that one of the Ars Arcana, the writer comments that it is of the most interest to him/her. I've never heard it from the man himself.

Respectfully, I do not believe this to be the case. I draw your attention to the fact that Miles found it prudent to keep his own tricks and talents a secret, such as keeping dynamite on his person to obviate the chance of being caught in a net. In addition, I do not believe Wax ever expressed to anyone how to do a steelbubble. Your personal opinions aside, we have a lot of evidence from the books that, yes, people who discover tricks still tend to keep them to themselves.

And do we know that doesn't happen? Have we seen a lot of spots where Shades have attacked, en masse? Were they described, and was mention made of the trees seeming hale and hearty regardless? For all we know, there might be patches that look like a small wildfire, and a wise Homesteader would look around and think, ah, the shades ate well a few nights ago...

But they'd normally have no need, or urge, to attack wood. Wood's not going to run, draw blood, or start a fire. And in the forests, it will never really be in a shade's way; it'll always be faster to go around the tree. But if a shade were in a box and someone outside the box drew blood? That might give it a reason. I can't get out, so I'll go through. I'm not saying this happens, or even that I especially think it does. But it's possible. Just because a shade hasn't done something, doesn't mean it wouldn't, if there's no reason to have expected it to do so yet.

Ta-dah. Your theory, as a whole, is interesting. It is a model that seems viable. The fact that it doesn't seem repeated on any other Shardworld doesn't do a lot to support your theory, however. It's totally viable, but at the moment I'm going to remain skeptical. Don't get caught in the trap of "Intent is an inviolate law". WoB is that this is not the case; I'll try to find it, but in his recent AMA he mentions that there are some Shards still successfully resisting their Intent. Recall, while Leras couldn't bring himself to kill Ruin himself, he was able to set up a plan to allow Ruin to kill him, risk destroying the entire world, so that someone else could take his power of Preservation, and use it to kill herself and Ati, all for the ultimate purpose, not of keeping the world static (as would be his Intent) but actually allowing it to flourish and grow. That's all some pretty hefting bucking of Intent, right there.

Peter: If you come to an East Coast signing, I will sing for you the parody I made for Mraize about his cosmere toys; On That Shardworld.

You keep saying this, and I keep asking you to tell me how we know this, and you keep avoiding it. Where, ever, does it say that a feruchemist automatically knows that there are multiple things he can store? From where are you getting this information? Where in the text does it say it? What WoB supports it? You are insistent that it's true, but this is the first I'm hearing of it. The sum total of what we know is that when a feruchemist touches a metal he can use to store things in, he feels "an affinity" for it, he doesn't see it like a number of shelves in a closet. Can you support this, or are you just going to restate it like it's presumed true again? You are totally ignoring the point I bring up about tin. We know tinminds can store at least one more sense than anyone has used. If your supposition is correct, Sazed knows this. He can feel that there's an emptiness in tin, even if he doesn't know what's supposed to go there. And he absolutely, for certain, never once mentions it. So you cannot keep saying, "He never mentions that there are different things that can be stored in a bronzemind" as evidence that this means nothing else can be stored in a bronzemind. Either he cannot sense "empty shelves" in a tinmind and therefore has no reason to believe "there's something extra that could be stored in metalmind, but I don't know what," or he can sense it, and simply chooses not to mention it, just as he does for three books with tin. Edgedancer: I'm bringing up tin again. You can store taste in a tinmind. Or you can store sight. You don't have to do anything different. You don't have to blind yourself to remove your sight in order for tin to take its place. You don't have to overlay your sight with some sort of energy in order to have it supercede taste. You, personally, possess five senses capable of being stored, one at a time, in a tinmind. All you have to do is decide which one. If you lacked a sense of smell, you'd only have four to choose from. If you somehow had electroreception, you'd have six to choose from. My contention is that when you burn steel, you now have two traits which can be stored in a steelmind. I don't see why you look at this and think, "No, that's impossible, nothing could ever work like that." Tin already works exactly like that. Your physical body is in possession of two traits right now, ones that are not terrible similar, but have commonalities. In tin, it's different ways to perceive the world. In steel, it's two traits associated with steel in the metallic arts.The power of Preservation has entered your body, filtered through the "form" of steel. It's steel-shaped. The metalmind on your arm has this exact same shape; it must, because it's steel, and can be burned allomantically. Why can't you accept that it's possible that affinity is enough to give you a second storeable trait? Why can you accept the five of tin (or six, or even more if you add in all the sense of the animal kingdom), or the two of bendalloy, but not that other metals might have multiple traits, as well? I understand normal compounding perfectly well. I never said "it's because they have preservation" or "because traits are similar". Something about the spiritual aspect of steel, when used feruchemically, gives it a certain signature. Something about the spiritual aspect of steel, when used allomantically, gives it a certain signature. The feruchemical signature can be used allomantically, without any special tricks. Why are you so absolutely certain that the allomantic signature cannot be used feruchemically, unless there's some additional step that compounding as we know it doesn't have? Normal compounding does not need special mechanical justification. At least, not compared to the other way around. In one, you store, and then burn. In the other, you burn, and then store. In both cases, it works because the spiritual signature of steel itself acts as a bridge between the metallic arts. Why do you believe the bridge would work one way, but not the other? If you think that both newspapers and scientists have maintained the exact same level of accuracy for the past hundred years... wow. I just... I just don't even know how to address that. A hundred years ago, heroin was sold over the counter to regulate the bowels. Women were considered too erratic to be trusted with the vote. Psychological conditions were dismissed as concussive brain injuries and ignored. And these all had the stamps of approval of the scientific community. You... I just don't even know how to talk to someone who thinks scientists a hundred years ago were right about everything they assumed was true. A hundred years from now, our descendants will look back and laugh at all the things we believed because our "scientists" told us it was true. A hundred years ago, every newspaper published flagrantly false stories of first-person accounts, and no one cared. Today, if you accidentally say a quote was spoken on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, you print a correction the next day. There are media watchdogs checking facts and keeping them in line. There are standards of citation and evidence. Upon what, exactly, are you basing your assumption that neither newspapers nor scientists have gotten any more accurate in a century? As I've said, several times, there's no reason to assume Wax knows about, or understands, the other kind of compounding. And if he does, there's absolutely no reason for him to think that someone being even better at burning allomantic gold would be a threat. He could have mentioned that Miles plays a mean game of poker, he could have talked about that time he won the horseshoe competition three years running, or his sterling baritone, but absolutely none of that was germane. As I said, Wax only knows about regular compounding because he's close, personally, to Miles. Marasi, who studies at a university, is an allomancer, and has done specific research on Miles, believed the stories were exaggerations and that he was simply a Bloodmaker. Why, exactly, would Wax have reason to suspect that the other kind of compounding even exists, if he doesn't know anyone who would ever use it? Maybe he's heard of a steel compounder somewhere in the South Roughs who supposedly has insane capabilities to steelpush... but discounts the stories as exaggerations, exactly like Marasi does. Maybe he says, "Oh, that's ridiculous. We know how regular compounding works, but the idea that compounding could work in reverse is insane. I won't consider it, the stories can't be real." That would be rather foolish of him, wouldn't it? Keep in mind, you cannot assume Wax only ever gets accurate information. People in Elendel believe a tineye could get metal by licking at walls. People will believe anything. Wax didn't get a lot of cohesive, accurate, repeated account of the steel compounder. He prolly hears stories of a new type of ferring that can store its size, go tiny and slip through a keyhole, then grow large and step on you. Or of a coinshot who can push aluminum. Or a new medicine that works, see, it's got snake oil in it, good for what ails ya... You have to get the context of that world in your mind. It's easy for us, with our single source of WoB, to always know instantly when something is right or wrong. But what if there were fifty Brandons going on tours around the country, 49 of them lying, all of them swearing they're telling the truth? All of them telling us things about the cosmere? There's no special magical quality about the "truth" that lets you hear it and know, that's the one that's real, all the others are bad alloys. If two people tell you something confidently, and both have internal consistency, without confirmation you have no way to deduce, this one is right, this one is wrong. So Wax didn't list all the stories that must circle around about Miles, most of them false. Just as he hears a dozen stories about other towns, other Twinborn, maybe even other Compounders, he couldn't possibly know which are real and which are Allomancer Jak unless he spends his life traveling across the known world to interview all these people himself and get the real information. And sure. I'm sure there are some people who do that. And they come back, and they write up their findings, and they publish them and they say, "This is true; buy my book, for it is accurate." And in the years they spent researching and traveling, two dozen other people sat at home, wrote entirely fictional stories about their own travels, made up literally every fact, made it sound fascinating and rivetting, and also published, and also said, "This is true; buy my book, for it is accurate." And there is no peer review. There is no group of people who can check and say, yes, this person actually went to this town, actually spoke to the person." You go to the bookstore and have twenty-five options to pick from, and the actually accurate book has nothing special about it. It's not got any sort of seal of approval, it's not magically floating. This is a world where the only way to learn something, for sure, is with your own research, which not every person in the known world has time to do. There's no internet. There's no snopes. There are no peer reviewed articles. There is no rigor. There are no mythbusters. Wax doesn't live in the world you live in. He lives in Elendel, and the things you take for granted are not available to him. This is a man who literally didn't know that take-out food existed. And yet, you assume he knows literally everything there is to know about an aspect of Investiture with no direct bearing on his life? That crops up incredibly rarely?

Allomancer Jak is kind of my point. There's no Snopes in Elendel. There are no Mythbusters. They're a culture that went from "believe what you're told" for a thousand years, to near-extinction, to paradise for three hundred years. Peer review is still prolly a bit down the line. Allomancer Jak is almost certainly not happening. I personally suspect that, exactly like the real-world "serials" pretending to be actual accounts that Allomancer Jak is satirizing, it's being written by some old woman who has never left Elendel and prolly isn't metalborn. There's no Allomancer Jak. He's not having tineye adventures among the koloss, he doesn't have a faithful terris servant and he doesn't get tin by licking walls. The writer says things, and people believe them, because people don't know better. People get told a lot. Like Marasi said, she heard about Miles and how he healed, and she assumed it was an exaggeration, that he was simply a bloodmaker like Wayne and the stories made him sound more impressive. You're thinking that in 2015, on earth, a woman in university could not possibly be mistaken about something so fundamental. This is not 2015. There's no internet. There are not world-wide scientific publications. They've had barely any time to figure out, from nothing, a method of scholarship that ensures nothing but true information is disseminated perfectly. Mr. Sanderson posted on facebook today that he was asked to write a summary of Shadows of Self, and in part he mentions that the time period is like 1910. Things weren't exactly the dark ages, but disinformation was everywhere. In the past twenty years, nutritionists have gone from saying eggs are great for you, eat them raw, to saying they're terrible, they have disease, cook them, to saying wait, they're terrible for you anyway because they have cholesterol, never eat an egg, to saying wait, eat them again, because we've discovered that dietary cholesterol has almost no impact on blood cholesterol... and this is an egg. Humans have been eating eggs as long as we've been human. Almost every human who was alive during those two decades has eaten an egg, their ancestors all ate eggs, everyone they know ate eggs. Every generation looks at the 'scientists' of the past and thinks how credulous they were, oh hey, there was once serious consideration given to the idea that the earth was a hollow sphere with layers of other lands deep inside you could get to from the poles, I'm glad we're not silly like that, we just believe everything out scientists tell us is so... It goes against what you might believe, or might want to believe, but it's absolutely in keeping with the time period and the general context that people would be hearing a dozen different contradictory reports about what exactly is or isn't possible in the metallic arts, and would believe some and not have heard of others. Yes, even someone in a university specifically studying that person. The problem isn't that people don't do research. Or that they don't say what they find, or think, or assume, or guess. The biggest, most fundamental problem is, there's no true academic foundation yet. Or if there is, it's relatively recent. I legitimately don't know, but how long did it take Earth to get a solid foundation of academia, with peer review, journals, institutions answerable to someone? How long ago was it that someone could just publish a book and have it be assumed true? The Alaska Gold Rush started in 1896, roughly analogous to the time of Alloy of Law. There is a town, affectionally called Liarsville, where new reporters would all go to, on the edge of gold territory, and sit around chilling all day, sending back 100% fictional accounts of their firsthand experiences out in the Klondike. Sure, they'd ask the prospectors coming back, hey what's it like, but basically for inspiration. The idea of trying to craft an accurate, factual account was ludicrous. They wouldn't even see that as the default setting, or a goal worth reaching. They would treat you like you just said, I know what let's do, next time it snows, let's arrange every flake in size order. ... Why? that's impossible, and there's no benefit. In modern times, we think of accuracy as a laudable goal. But that's a reasonably modern idea.I do not think the world of academia on Scadrial is up there, yet. Have they even discovered the scientific method, yet? Is it enforced universally? Are experiments performed with control groups? Is bias accounted for, margin of error? Are results replicated? Maybe if Elend had survived. Or any of the Keepers. But alas. I'm also gonna take this opportunity to point out again, Twinborn at all, let alone Compounders, let alone people with allomantic powers worth compounding, actually are insanely rare. I don't find it surprising at all, in an age which may or may not even have the telegraph, that accurate and somewhat obscure knowledge is widely known. Keep in mind; who in the book knows how compounding works? People who know Miles personally, not people who have simply read reports on him. This is not an age of wikipedia. ...Yes, you did. What else are you saying here? If you're not assuming that a feruchemist touches a metal and thinks, "here are the traits which can be stored in this metal", what are you saying? Why do you assume they know, instinctively? When have we seen that happen? Where in the books is it explained to us, or shown, that this is how feruchemy works? The reason no one's ever felt it is beside The Lord Ruler, no feruchemist has ever had an allomantic trait to store. We know, per WoB, that tinminds could, under the right circumstances, store electroreception. Yet Sazed never says aloud, "Huh, it sure it odd while I touch this tinmind, filling it, that I can feel that I should be able to store another type of sense." So either he can't "feel" all the possibilities currently unavailable to him, or he does "feel" them and doesn't mention them. Either way, your point is, he would absolutely have mentioned them if they existed. We know for a fact that things do exist, which he does not mention. To harken to something Moogle said a while ago (I think it was Moogle), to clarify, Miles does not talk about how worthless his gold is. He talks about how people commonly believe it to be worthless, but that he disagrees; he thinks that being able to see his own alternate selves is very useful. And then he does it. There's no reason for him to comment on whether or not he can burn gold EVEN BETTER; a normal burn is perfectly fine for him. Also recall, he's not exactly of a researching kind of mind, and burning gold, even for him, is a jarring experience; I don't have trouble believing he's never gotten around to spending an afternoon burning it, trying to figure out if there's a way to make it even more jarring and confusing via feruchemy. Sure, he'd be interested in other compounders. But we can't assume accurate information was available to him. He didn't have a smartphone, or siri. Reports on Miles himself were apparently less than fully accurate, as we've discussed. Unless he actually knew another compounder who had figured out the trick of the other compounding, why should we assume he'd have heard about it? This isn't our modern world, where nerds have the disposable income and free time to gather in a huge global community, perform experiments and share information back and forth. They might be interested, but just like "Allomancer Jak" makes outrageous claims, the very fact that they'd buy any broadsheet claiming to have interviewed an anonymous compounder is exactly why there's a better chance some broadsheet will make up an interview than that they'd publish a real one.

Unless they can rot wood. Or maybe they are gaseous and can get out through cracks? How high does the protection go? Why didn't the shade just float up through the ceiling, and the roof, and leave the waystation? I can't quite come up with a model that answers all of these questions.

...which would have been entirely irrelevant. He was talking for the express purpose of explaining why Miles was so dangerous; mentioning that he was also really, really good at hurting himself by seeing more of himself had no bearing. Could he have mentioned it? Sure. Is it conspicuous that he didn't? Absolutely not. There are plenty of times he could bring up what feruchemical bendalloy does; it wouldn't have been germane, but he could have thrown it in as a "historical aside." He didn't, because there wasn't a point. We know, nevertheless, that bendalloy does have feruchemical properties. Also, I'm not positive I agree with the assumption that anything a compounder can do must be general knowledge; for example, the exact citation Moogle just gave us. Marasi is in university. She's an allomancer. She studies the great lawkeepers, Miles Dagouter included. Yet she needs to have the basics of regular compounding explained to her. Why, then, if we see that it's apparently not commonly known how regular compounding works, do we assume that everything else has to be common knowledge, and that therefore if everyone doesn't know it, we can assume it's not true? Marasi herself didn't know about regular compounding, and there's every reason she should have. Where is your evidence to support your assumption that if it were possible, literally everyone would know about it? Remember, twinborn alone are very, very rare. Wax says, at the wedding, that although 20% of the Originators were Terris, they've kept mostly to themselves, and only a fraction of the population has mixed blood. A small fraction of those people will have one power or the other; a much smaller fraction will have both and be twinborn. Something like one in sixteen of those will be compounders. Aluminum, duralumin, gold, almost a quarter of compounders have an allomantic power with no real benefit to finding a way to boost via feruchemy. We're down to a miniscule number of people who would ever be in a position to realize how simple it is. Since we already know that people knowledgeable in this specific area don't know how regular compounding works, how do you justify your assumption that their exact same ignorance on the subject of the other kind of compounding is solid enough evidence that you're all very certain it's simply impossible? Moogle: Good catch on Inquisitors compounding, and excellent reference. It's even better than the one I thought of on my way home today; which is a quote saying that if Vin had kept Ruin trapped, and had decided to follow Rashek's example and stay alive for a thousand years to fix it again, she'd've had to use hemalurgy to gain the ability to compound and would therefore be under his influence for all that time, meaning she'd prolly end up as bad and insane as Rashek. However, this is my fault. I sorta nerd-sniped myself and took us down a tangent. The fact remains: Marsh's ability to compound, or not, is entirely irrelevant. My argument is that allomantic compounding is that easy. Moogle's rebuttal was, if it was that easy, Marsh would have done it. He didn't do it, ergo it can't happen. Regardless of anything else, we know that Marsh had the opportunity to use feruchemical compounding in his various fights, and simply never did. Therefore, we know for a fact that, with the opportunity, Marsh simply didn't do it. Therefore, you cannot attack my point by saying, Marsh would have if we could have; we know he could have used regular compounding and didn't, so your premise is entirely gone. Maybe it was plot armor. Maybe it was some other reason. It doesn't matter what the reason was; the fact remains, you cannot say something is impossible because Marsh didn't do it, because we know for a fact that Marsh didn't do something we know was possible. Voidus: ... Why are you assuming they could feel a second way to use feruchemy? Vin is one of the few allomancers, ever, who ever felt a second way to use allomancy, and that was only when the metal she was burning was charged with something. Also, I'm not sure what your point is with the "less than intuitive". Vin does exactly that. Sazed has a "moderate amount" of strength stored in his earring back, but goes ahead and wastes it to see what happens when Vin burns it. As it turns out, it gives a clue to how regular compounding works. What point were you trying to make there? Where do we have evidence of a feruchemist picking up a bit of metal and thinking, "yes, this, this is clearly the thing I can store in this metal, even though I didn't know that before"? Because otherwise you're just assuming that this is how feruchemy works, when... there's no evidence of that. From what I recall, Mr. Sanderson has said that if a feruchemist touches metal in which he can store a trait, he feels an "affinity". Vin had the reserves of metal in her stomach that first night with Kelsier, and just by having the reserves got no clue how the metals worked or what they did. She had to burn them and see. Even when she burned iron, she saw blue lines, but even when she focused on one and made a nail fly at her chest, she needed it explained to her by Kelsier that iron pulls metal to your body. So why exactly are you assuming that a feruchemist touches a piece of metal and instantly knows perfectly any and everything he can do with it? Vin burns iron, and never thinks to herself, "Wow, y'know what, with just a little tweak, this metal would let me weigh a lot...". Nothing in a tinmind changes when you decide to store sight instead of scent. The Intent comes into play. Yet, it does store separate things. When you hold a tinmind, there are five possible things you can choose to store in it. When you're burning steel and holding a steelmind, there are two possible things you can store in it. Nothing has to change in the metal for you to pick one trait over the other, in either example. But I'm done. You're all arguing from a place of assumptions and "that doesn't feel right to me" and I can't change either of those things. But when, in the fullness of time, we learn how the other kind of compounding works and I'm proven right, I'm going to tell you all that I told you so. Just kidding.

I suspect he meant they would be lured in under false pretences... but there are still issues. They don't want a trail leading back to them. No one has the first idea where the Vanishers are. All it would take was one woman saying, "Good-bye, mother, I'm heading to an appointment, I expect to be back in a few hours, do you know the best way to get to this address? Should I go through the Fields of Rebirth to avoid the traffic, or just go right over the bridge?" and then when she vanishes, that's a clue for people to start following.

SA

Wayne comments that he's a decent artist. I think it's obvious then. This next book will be about Wayne, sitting in front of a mirror, drawing a picture of himself with Tekiel Tower in the background. Oh... wait, the title isn't "Shadows of Selfie"? Nevermind, then.

Feruchemy does not need any trickery. You store an attribute, then burn it, and get the attribute tenfold. In this model, you burn a metal, and store it in your metalmind. How is the first any more complicated than the second? Yata: While you raise an interesting point, I'm going to rebut with a similar one. You're right. The Inquisitors should have been compounders. At the start of Hero of Ages, an Inquisitor tries to spike Elend, and stops, seemingly because he's run out of speed. Why else would he stop? He slows down enough for Vin to kill him. We know it was Ruin's intention to get a spike into Elend; an epigraph reveals this. So there was no reason for him to deliberately slow down. Yet, we know he has allomantic steel (he did the horseshoe trick) and we know he had feruchemical steel. He should have absolutely been able to spike Elend, but he didn't. We know Marsh has both powers, yet he also didn't just compound infinite speed to fight Elend. (Moogle: Note, you also bring up that Marsh doesn't compound the other way around. To which Ia sk you this simple question: Why didn't he compound the way we know works?) Why not? I'm not sure. Maybe hemalurgically stolen traits don't mesh for compounding? Maybe the Identities of your allomantic and feruchemical steel have to match for compounding, so even if you take the powers hemalurgically and graft them into your own spiritweb, they will each function independently but still won't let you compound. We have no idea. The only people we've seen compound were either born with all their powers, or born with half of them and acquired the others through lerasium. I'm also going to point out the example of tin, and of bendalloy. Feruchemically, they store different things. When you hold a tinmind, you decide if you're going to store your sight, or your smell, or your touch. When you hold a bendalloymind, you can put nutrition in it, or hydration. Why, then, is it so difficult to imagine that if you're holding a steelmind, you can choose whether you're going to store physical speed, or allomantic steel? People keep talking as though it's simply obvious that the second makes no sense while allomantic compounding is obviously a natural outcropping. I don't agree in the least. Moogle: You say, why isn't every compounder doing this? To which I say... are they not? We've seen exactly one AoL era compounder, and his allomantic power was of marginal usefulness. Where, exactly, in the book do they mention that compounding only works one way? Where is there a point in the book where the lack of saying, "By the way, this has no relevance on what's happening here, but here's a trick Compounders other than Miles might use at times" is conspicuous?

Okay. Since you acknowledge that you're not actually making an argument, I'm going to proceed to discount your personal opinion, and try to get back to the actual discussion. Dijini: To take your observation a step further, what about burning a steelmind full of allomantic steel? I feel like since it's already the power of Preservation, you're unlikely to be able to multiply it any further; burning it would simply give you the same form, and same power output, as regular steel. Oooo aluminum! I wonder if this might be the trick to getting a lot of aluminum. Imagine. You've got an aluminummind on your arm, and some flakes in your stomach. Before you burn, you're already storing allomantic aluminum; you've got nothing to give, but you store it anyway. So the instant you start burning, the new 'channel' is open, and the power is diverted to your aluminummind, rather than your body. So it only burns at its own actual burn rate, rather than wiping itself out along with other metals. Then later, you can tap it for the actual aluminum affect, but keep it going, rather than have the aluminum use itself up instantly. This could be very useful for keeping yourself basically immune to "outside Investiture," rather than having to let it affect you while wiping out your own reserves. In fact, if it's not considered a reserve, you could have a bunch of metalminds with stored allomantic powers, and keep aluminum burning continuously to throw off foreign Investiture, while still using other abilities. You wouldn't be able to use duralumin, but that shouldn't matter, since you can just draw out a lot of steel at once, for instance, to be artificially powerful, even better than a duralumin-boost. This is starting to seem broken powerful. Admittedly, someone who is a full feruchemist and mistborn was broken powerful to begin with, before any of this happened, so the functional change is marginal at best.

Welcome to the Shard! I assume you know this, from the way you explain allomancy, but to clarify in case someone is about to contradict you; we know Alendi had hemalurgic spikes, so like allomancy, people did it, they just didn't know they did it. Elantris/Emperor's Soul spoilers Anyway. Welcome to the forums! Hope to hear from you soon. My personal obsession is Scadrial, so I hope we see a lot of you on the Mistborn forum.

And where is your evidence that they haven't? Compounders might or might not be rare, but the fact is we've only seen one, who seemed perfectly content with the amount of allomantic power simply burning gold gave him. Why do you assume it's not been discovered, just because it hasn't been expressly mentioned? Since we don't see a steel compounder, it's not yet conspicuous in its absence. The rest of your post makes absolutely no sense. What you personally are willing to accept or not has no relevance. It is entirely subjective. You, personally, can accept it or not; this is not proper citation to support a legitimate argument.

That is a good quote which pretty well supports my argument but I do not believe it's the one I was thinking of... I feel like I've read a quote expressly stating that an artist with enough Breath will actually commune with Endowment, and that this is a means Endowment has to provide guidance to the Returned. I will try to find it.

Yeah... if I had to guess, I would suggest that Returned DNA is actually normal, but that the spiritual effects of their powerful Divine Breath overwrites the purely physical effects of their DNA. Just one man's opinion. Spoilers for Mistborn, SA Just random speculation.

1. As has been said, there must be specific intent. Someone in the process must will hemalurgy to happen, or it won't. 2. Composition, as has been mentioned, matters. If you stab a steel spike through someone with no allomancy, it can't take anything. 3. Theftpoints exist. You cannot simply stab someone anywhere; you must stab them through a specific point in their body. WoB has told us that the heart contains theftpoints for most traits, but even then, it seems to be narrowed down to things as specific as nerves; stab the wrong part of the heart, and you won't successfully steal allomantic brass, for example. As for "is it hard to store in a spike," remember all of the Arts of Scadrial are rather low-Investiture. I suspect it would technically be more difficult, but not to an extreme extent. Like walking across a flat sidewalk is easy; walking across a sidewalk that has a slight incline for a few meters is technically more difficult, but not prohibitively. This is just my impression from the books, however.