Oudeis

Have fun figuring out how you would burn steel and get speed instead of steelpushing. OH WAIT THAT'S ALREADY HOW IT WORKS. According to allomancy, the two traits are clearly considered "close enough". Can you give me a reason feruchemy wouldn't follow the same pattern? And Skaa: I don't think he's talking about nicrosil. I know everyone assumes that's how nicrosil works, but I've long been a proponent of exactly the theory djin is proposing. The same way burning steel with a feruchemical charge can overwrite the power coming from allomancy, the same way Vin, when she burns Sazed's metalmind, can see his pewter reserve even if she can't access it, I think that "pushing on metal" is simply another trait which is capable of being stored in a steelmind.

Your post was fine, and if someone wants to start a thread, "Rashek: Dumb or Clever?" I would respond more fully. But we're both agreeing that our arguments are speculative at best, and we've pointed to arguments we've each interpreted different ways. Part of it, I feel like people conflate a lot of things and call it all "clever" or "intelligent". There's no more one "smart" than there is one "athletic". Two people can both be very athletic, and yet be physically incredibly different, depending on what sport you're talking about. Do you want to have large, bulky muscles? A more wiry frame? The ability to hold your breath a long time? Hand-eye coordination? Excellent sight for distances? A sense of balance? Each of these are unique, and you can have a single person with all of them, but that doesn't mean a basketball player will have the qualities required for distance archery or water polo. I'm not trying to argue that I think Rashek was the dumbest, just that he wasn't necessarily all that clever. But yeah. Power-gaming. Power gaming is what I do when I'm tired of thinking and my brain needs a rest. It's the mental equivalent of... I dunno. Warming up? Something very simple, very repetitive, something very narrow in scope that doesn't require much vision. Power-gaming is what I do when I'm too tired to do something actually engaging.

No.

Eh, I could respond to your argument, but we're both admitting that it's mostly head!canon at this point. Though I do take exception to your suggestion that powergaming makes someone clever. I have to confess, it might just be bias on my part. We know that before he ever got to the Well, he was a racist, genocidal, megalomaniacal hate-monger, and I would simply like the world better if such people were stupid.

He didn't hide it very... well. Haha no but for real. Within two weeks of legitimately searching for it, Vin found it. However 'well' he hid the well, the thumps were gonna lead her right to it. Besides her, in a thousand years, who else was looking for it? What would they have done, before the millenial power re-gathered? As for tricking Ruin... that, I grant you, was a good plan. Simple, but good. I'm still not sure one good idea in a thousand years makes one especially clever. I dunno. I have nothing really to support it... I just see Rashek as sorta a brute. A ton of power, and maybe plenty of determination, but not the sharpest marble in the cookie jar. Just my own head!canon, I guess.

I'll try to get an exact quote next time I'm at my home computer (which might be in a few days...) When Vin first hears about the plan to overthrow the Lord Ruler, she thinks to herself, you might as well promise to turn day into night, or remove the mists from the sky! ...Both things she, of course, eventually does.

He absolutely did. Though I do not share your confidence in his intelligence. Still, perhaps you meant that even Rashek was smart enough to realize there must be an alloy.

Paradox: Thank you for putting that behind a spoiler, but if you mark what it's a spoiler for (in this case, SA3) people will know whether or not it's safe to read it. This point keeps getting made, over and over, like a Highstorm, and I am getting almighty tired of it. For what I hope but realize isn't the final time: We do not need to know exactly and specifically what happened in order to realize that SOMETHING happened. You, and many others, keep saying it like this. "Unless you cheated, you don't know she has Transportation, so there's no way to know exactly what happened." I am not contending, nor is it relevant, that we don't know exactly what happened. I never said, "And Mr. Sanderson revealed to us what happened, as it happened." I had no idea she'd gone to Shadesmar. Even knowing what I did about the Surges (which, despite accusations I've received from others, was neither cheating, nor bad, nor something I "shouldn't have done") I didn't know what was going to happen. And I didn't have to. You are proposing a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy; you are trying to claim that since we didn't know exactly what happened, the only other possible assumption would be that literally nothing interesting happened. Stop making that argument. It's wrong, and it's not a point contrary to anything anyone who disagrees with you is saying. It was, and is, entirely possible to realize, "Hey wait, something has happened here I don't yet fully understand," without saying, "I understand literally everything that has happened here." I realize this will have no effect. I realize that this will not stop you, or any of a dozen other people, from saying one more time, "But you only knew she transported because you read things unavailable in the text." And I'm making my peace with that. I just feel better for having gotten this off my chest. You talk about how we couldn't know she could survive in Shadesmar... I never thought she went to Shadesmar. Since we know, in-text, that she's a Soulcaster, I actually assumed she just made a fake body for them to kill; it's worth noting that by the time Shallan sees 'Jasnah', she's on the ground in a stupor with a head wound, right before being stabbed in the heart. She never moves, or walks, or speaks, she just lies there like a meat puppet, so I figured she'd conjured up a double to fool the assassins... exactly like Shallan does a moment later, with an illusion. Happens I was wrong, and truthfully this never struck me as ENTIRELY plausible, but it was still a viable alternative. The important thing to note is that the body was gone. That doesn't just happen. Ships are tiny, cramped spaces. The body was there, then it was gone. Shallan comments how weird that is. It's unlikely in the extreme that the men would have taken it, and there's nowhere for it to go, and Shallan even takes a moment to think about the oddity. This, to me, was a huge red flag. Something happened here. Now, I've been accused in other places of treating people like they are stupid. This is, of course, not the case. I'm not saying everyone should have seen this. I'm not saying everyone did see it. There are hugely obvious things, in this book and others, that I missed on my first read-through. There are a lot of words in Words of Radiance. There are a lot of little tricky things, subtle clues left, big and small, for future events big and small. The smartest of us will miss some, the most casual of us will see others. No point of this debate is supposed to be taken as, "I saw this thing, and you didn't, and that makes me smarter than you." This whole thing started from people saying, there was no foreshadowing. There was no way to know. There were no clues. And that's not true. There's no shame in admitting you missed a clue. I missed a ton of stuff. That doesn't mean I now go back and claim the clues which were there did not exist, because I'm not ashamed to admit that I simply missed something. The plain fact is, there was foreshadowing that Jasnah was not dead. Some of it was subtle, some of it was easier to find if you read WoB, but it was there. It was not a slam dunk, it was not a glowing sign, it was not the words JK JASNAH'S NOT REALLY DEAD OKAY GO BACK TO THE STORY, and it wasn't specific, but the clues were there. Most pages of Mr. Sanderson's works have clues in them, and the best of us pick up something in the neighborhood of half of them. Some of us noticed this. Some of us did not. No one is saying the people who missed this are dumb, or that they don't pay enough attention. I would politely ask that (and I realize not everyone is saying this) those saying that the clues either did not exist, or you could only possibly notice them if you're a 'cheater', calm down, stop taking offense where no offense was meant, and stop hurling hurtful accusations.

The 'goons' had just raced abovedecks to chase Shallan's doppleganger; even if they'd been so inclined as to take Jasnah's corpse, it would have been difficult, obvious, and slow. I'll have to read the scene again, but I'm pretty sure from what Shallan sees, it's clear that this didn't happen. Regardless, even if there might be another explanation... it just struck me as a hugely weird thing for him to point out, especially to make it seem as discordant as it did. Her body wasn't there, and this was very strange. Those two things were apparent from the scene. Like I said, it's not a slam dunk. Based on that I was only mostly sure she was still alive (though seeing what Stormlight can do, I was very, very sure). Either you're saying that the missing body could have meant a few different things, including that Jasnah wasn't dead, in which case, we agree. Or, you're saying no, her mysteriously vanishing corpse gave no indication that she'd pulled through... which I do not agree with. Nor, I think, have you made that point by citing one unlikely alternative.

While valid, Yata, there's no reason you have to know she has Transport to know she survived. If you read Way of Kings, you know Stormlight can help you heal the damage a Highstorm does. Even if you don't, the body mysteriously vanishes. That's not a "well, done deal, she's alive," but it's a pretty obvious clue that something happened. Corpses don't routinely dissolve into thin air. Maybe you have no idea what the mechanism is, yet, but unless you missed that line, it's a pretty big clue that SOMETHING has happened.

Notice that the question asks about atium rather than a non-divine metal, the question itself is based on a flawed premise (Elend did not have 'a bead of atium', he had a stomach full of atium), and Mr. Sanderson's reply is vague and abstract. I personally reconcile them by saying, "the stuff we know from the text, supported by concrete and specific WoB is probably right, and this WoB which is vague and abstract is mostly right". Let me clarify... it's not "totally wrong." He's just talking in an abstract way. Galileo proposed that two weights, one at twice the mass, would fall at the same speed from the leaning tower of pisa. He was wrong... the more massive weight landed while the other was still several inches in the air. He was inexact, but not "totally wrong". What he does flat-out say, without equivocation, is "it is just the sum of the metal, with nothing else added." This is basically like saying two weights will fall at the same speed. The additional line is just allowing that this is only mostly true; one weight will land first, because there are other factors. Doesn't change the underlying principle. Like I said, there is strong evidence that the effects of pewter stop the instant the pewter runs out, like any other metal, so trying to assume that this time it lasts for fifteen seconds after the burn ends, just to justify a vague WoB answering a confusing question... I just don't see the need. Also; you almost seem to be attributing to me the idea that aluminum and duralumin must affect metal at the same rate. I've spoken elsewhere (though I cannot find the link) of the fact that despite apparent similarities, aluminum, duralumin, nicrosil and chromium all have interesting distinctions. Aluminum, for example, metabolizes every metal in your system; duralumin only affects ones which are burning. Aluminum metabolizes itself; duralumin does not. This second fact is germane; since it does metabolize itself, if the burn rate were any slower, it would almost never rid your body of every other metal. Since aluminum is both burning and being metabolized, the candle is burning at both ends, and most other metals you weren't burning would outlast the effect. Finally, duralumin is commonly called a burst, or very fast, or "at once," but is never specifically listed as instantaneously, and from the example I cited, seems to take fifteen seconds. Aluminum, by contrast, is explicitly listed as instantly the one time it is used. (I will try to post the direct quote when I get home from the gym tonight). Saying that if we assume duralumin takes fifteen seconds, we must assume the same of aluminum, is like saying copper must affect ones own emotions, because zinc affects others'. Just because one is the 'internal' version of the other does not assume they are otherwise identical in every respect; indeed, we have example after example of times they have many differences.

I know; I certainly wasn't implying that this happens under normal circumstances. I meant that in this specific case, a Returned and a human are simply too different to bear a child, but that the resulting creature is one Divine Breath away from viability. It's not 'family connections', it's the fact that the child is already part Returned. I actually don't think it HAS to be the father (or mother) who gives his/her Divine Breath to the child; I think any Divine Breath will do. I think Vo did it because there were no other Returned, and that starting the line was his Command. Alternatively, and this hadn't occured to me until just now: Maybe the hybrids are that way simply by virtue of their sDNA; if they could be born live, they would manifest the Locks and the tiny spark of Divine Breath. However, they won't survive, because they die in utero. In which case, the Divine Breath 'heals' them enough to bring them to term, and then their manifestation of the Locks is simply what they'd've had under any circumstance.

...Except that their children become like Vivenna, with the Royal Locks and a permanent tiny fragment of Divine Breath, and no need to consume a Breath a week. Unless you're saying you think the in utero Divine Breath cures them, and isn't just eaten once, but causes the other effect?

...except that in (EDIT: meant to make this a link to the thread) the example nowhere cites, Vin ends by specifically saying that her pewter runs out. I suppose it's possible she meant 'the effect of my pewter' but the book is filled with examples of burning being on/off; if you burn, you have the effect. If you stop burning, the effect doesn't 'last' for any length of time, it just turns off. Spook is a good example; at his savant rate, if your idea was correct, running out of (or turning off) tin should mean he gradually slides down from supersenses, passing through normal senses, and finally sliding into dull senses. The book is pretty clear that the change is like a lightswitch. Can you give us any support for your idea that burning duralumin and pewter uses up the pewter instantly, but lets the effect last longer? Or is it just an idea you have? Also, there's WoB that if people are more powerful, it means they're burning faster. The answer was given specifically in response to a question about the relative powers of Vin and Elend. Elend does not burn any more efficiently than Vin does, he can just burn faster than she does. If you were right, and duralumin was instant, it would be an equalizer; if they both have a gram of brass in their systems, burning it at once should release identical amounts of power. But they don't; Elend is stronger. Meaning that even under duralumin, his burn rate must be faster than hers. Now, of course, I realize you can speculate about even more esoteric phenomena for which we have no proof. You can say, well maybe duralumin actually does add some power, not just lets you burn through the supply faster, so that explains Elend's power differential. And sure, no one could say it's wrong... but it's a long, long speculative bridge, asking us to ignore clear evidence from the books and supporting W's-o-B. No one will be able to prove it wrong, but I think you're standing in defiance of the evidence if you say that metal burning speed is not the same as duration of the effect.

Perhaps Returned have stillborn children, but if a Divine Breath is used, it revives the baby to life? So, maybe Vo came back, impregnated his wife, but knew in a vision that the baby would not survive, but that he could fix it by giving it his Breath, so he did so, died, and the child was born as the first with the Royal Locks, a fragment of Divine Breath?

Do they float through the air? Can they pass through matter? We know people can be pushed through their substance. We know they can nevertheless grasp; Silence comments that there is substance to them, and they can hold people, slow them down. Yet a ring of silver will stop them; the waystop need not be under a dome. Nor can they go underground and come up through the floor. Theopolis's cave was "lined with silver". Did that mean just at the entrance? Every wall? If shades can go through matter, isn't that what you'd need to protect a cave? So, shades have some substance; they're like a thick, fluid gas somehow under motive control. They cannot go underground, because they have too much matter for that. Can they fly? Need they stay at ground level? Can they climb trees? Jump off cliffs? Cross water? Why are shades only found on Hell? Can they not float across the ocean to Homeland? Is it that they could, but they don't feel like it? Do they experience a compulsion, like... plants will lean towards the light. In their seemingly pointless meanderings, do they have a tendency to stay near places their prey might be found, i.e., land as opposed to sea? What would happen to a shade at sea? If one got on a boat... would it only consider "running" to be in relation to the boat, or would it frenzy when the ship went too fast? Would its own speed be in relation to the boat, or would it just pace along as fast as it could to keep up with the life on the boat, and fall overboard if the ship went too fast? Would it sink into the water, or stay on the surface? Could wind keep a shade away? They have some substance, but not much weight. That seems like the perfect recipe for a storm, or even just normal rain, to make them dormant. Could someone with a powerful electric fan blow shades away?

Having just re-read the book, looking out for things relating to this: There is a body; it doesn't wither. She didn't find Theopolis in his cave, she just told people she did. He was killed in her kitchen, and she moved his body to the "cold cellar" until she claimed to have found it in his hidey-hole. So either he never turned into a shade, for some reason, or he turned into a shade and she left him to wander the woods, or he turned into a shade and she killed him. Either way, a body was left, just like a body was left for Red.

Actually, I'll try to find it but I think he's answered that. It was just someone in the city; someone of the Third Heightening is close enough to Endowment, communed with the Shard while painting something specifically for a Returned, and was inspired to paint in such a way that it sparked a revelation in Lightsong. This sort of thing apparently happens occasionally. I will attempt to locate the relevant quote.

Please mark Stormlight Archive spoilers, as we are in the Mistborn forum. Stormlight Archive:

You... both seem to be missing the point of compounding. The storing rate is practically irrelevant. I don't know if this is accurate, but it says humans produce 100 watts of energy. My link above gives us a benchpost to reach for; 1.875 terawatts. Let's assume you can only store 1% of your body's energy output. That gives us a nice even number: 1 watt. (I don't like these units, since we've "stored" an absolute amount of energy, you haven't stored 'joules per second', but it's the unit everyone's working with and the math does work out easily, so we're good.) So after an hour, you have enough energy to produce 1 watt of energy for an hour. This is why storing doesn't matter. Compounding gives you a return on your investment by an order of magnitude. Let's say you stored the heat in a few flakes of brass. You swallow the brass, burn it, compound it, and immediately store the return. You now have 10 watts over an hour, for a few seconds work. You've stored this energy in ten times as many flakes. You burn those flakes, and now have 100 watts. A terawatt is simply 12 orders of magnitude. In an hour of compounding, tops, you've compounded twelve times. Hey, let's go one more; now you've compounded an order above a terawatt, and for an hour you can burn with energy at 5x what the article above says you need to end the world. Obviously, you personally would not survive an hour, and would have to stop tapping heat, so you simply pull it all out in one big lump. That much energy infuses your body, which is rapidly your corpse, your clothes, your immediate surroundings, and sets off the firestorm that ends the world, sparked by 1x10^13 watts of power in a second. Or take a week, and keep compounding, until you have so much that the exponent has to be written in scientific notation. My point is, the trick to compounding is that storing speed becomes utterly irrelevant. That's basically the only thing you get out of compounding; otherwise, it can't do anything simple feruchemy can't do.

No... there's a WoB out there saying that lerasium is basically a metal "anyone can burn". It rewrites your spiritweb, and the default setting is to rewrite a stronger connection to preservation, effectively making you a Mistborn. If you knew what you were doing, you could choose to do something else with lerasium, but it would still be by the same mechanism. You're still 'burning' it either way, but it's like, if you take brass for the first time and just instinctively push, you might be Soothing every emotion at once, and just making people feel apathy. If you know what you're doing, you can reduce only anger, or everything but fear, and do something very, very different. But it's still using the same power, the same way. Also, someone asking a question with an assumed premise, when the answer is RAFO, is not proof that the assumed premise of the question was correct. Also, I will try to find it... there's a WoB, I believe, or it might be in the annotations, that atium shavings were secretly fed to some obligators to see if they were Seers. This isn't it but it implies it... ooo, also, proof Rashek knew about duralumin, which I was contending recently somewhere else... If it's being tested, I don't think leaving it in someone's stomach without burning it makes them a feruchemist. The lerasium made Elend an allomancer instantly, and vin had her atium from Zane in her stomach for hours.

Hrm. You seem to be arguing the point in both directions. First you say, if it's stored, the power would still replenish, because it's infinite. But then you say, if you store enough of it, you have all of it, because it's finite. It's one of the two. If it's infinite, you could store it forever and never get the whole Shard, or even enough to matter. If it's finite, then the power is 'trapped', and it won't replenish. Either way, I don't see you able to use this trick to keep collecting the power until you have the whole Shard, even with a mountain of nicrosil. Another point; I'm not sure nicrosil could hold the power of the well. It might be able to hold something. Saying, "nicrosil stores investiture, the Well is investiture, therefore nicrosil can store the well" is a little like saying, "This cage is designed to hold animals, Frank is an animal, therefore the cage will hold him." If the cage is a cat-carrier, and Frank is a silverback gorilla, the first two statements are true, but do not prove the third. If there's anything that has the simple raw power to break its way out of whatever means feruchemy uses to trap something, I'd suspect it's the power of a Shard. As for the mining of atium. A few points. First, we have no idea how quickly it used to condense; all we have is the rate at which it does at the time of the Collapse, which is presumably something near, maybe slightly below, one per week per slave they have. If it was significantly more, the slaves would have a much greater chance of finding them, and they wouldn't die very frequently. Also, and admittedly I'm speculating a bit here, when Kelsier destroyed the mines with iron, he could easily have found any leftover atium waiting to be harvested. He did not come back with fabulous riches, so presumably if there was more to be found, it was a marginal amount. So, my thought is, after at least two thousand years, all the atium, basically, has been found; the reason some of it grows back is, people burn it, and when it's released, it replenishes. I have to look it up; how many guards were there at the Pits? I'm sure they say early in The Final Empire when Vin suggests targetting it with the army. Can we extrapolate from that to a fermi estimation of how many prisoners they'd be guarding, and therefore approximately how much atium they harvest every week (assuming that at least a fraction of them are killed (or just die) each week)? See if that seems like a reasonable number for "the amount of atium every Mistborn across the Final Empire might burn in the average week", keeping in mind that the Lord Ruler has to compound it to give himself a thousand years of age for seven more days, each week. Okay I'm nerd-sniping myself... A thousand years of youth... for seven days... is seven thousand.... year/days? That is the worst unit ever. However, we know that compounding returns an attribute tenfold, meaning however he did it, whatever the mechanism, whether he burns a year, fills a bead with ten years, burns the ten years to get a hundred, over and over, at the end of the day, one way or another he'll have burned the atium for 700 year/days. God I need a better way to say that. In fact, the more recursive his burn, the more atium he'd have to burn. So, assuming he has sufficient stored-youth already to just burn... how much atium would 700 year/days be? I would estimate that at no less than hundreds of beads. So basically, I think the atium isn't being produced forever because the atium is infinite, I think it's being produced to replenish exactly as much as is being burned. Remember, Vin and Ruin are absolutely equal. Not a smidge of difference in their power. Perfectly balanced. Preservation has his power invested in humanity. Ruin's equal amount is tied up in the atium. If it were drawing forever, Ruin would actually be weaker than preservation. But he's not; they're balanced. This is what I feel a lot of people don't get about the atium. It's not about the physical atium; it's about the cycle. A chunk of Ruin's power has been removed, and placed into a system. Through the mechanism of the Pits, this power collects in physical form. Burning it allomantically releases the power and send it back to the 'pool' from which atium condences. If this were not the case, the army of Seers at the end of Hero of Ages would have been giving atium's power right back to Ruin, but they weren't. But the rest of your idea is solid.

First, I concur with the people above. You cannot say, this is my weakness, oh but I'm immune to my own weakness. If it's your weakness, it's your weakness. Suicide. I knock you out. Break your legs. Break most of your fingers. Leave you in a cell underground, every wall a mirror, with fresh water and rations for a year. Possibly infect you with something disfiguring and painful but not life-threatening... something in the 'rash' category. Leave you a loaded gun, a knife, some well-labeled poison... you get the idea. Now, maybe you persevere. Maybe in the depths of your trauma-induced, isolation-bred insanity you find some plateau of crazy strength, and do everything in your own power to stay alive long enough to run out of water and food, and a year later, one hour before you die, so do I. Or, sometime during that year, you have one single solitary moment of weakness, born of pure agony, executed in feverish delirium, and you just want the pain to go away for just the barest moment... and you save my life by taking your own.

Eh, I feel like a line of vigor, or Fitch's Knight, would cut through a dozen stick figures, no problem. And remember, Melody says people tried to make circle blobs filled with chalk, and they took directions so poorly they wouldn't even march in the right direction. If you made a dozen stick figures, how many of them would even make it to the Circle of Warding? Ten Wild Chalklings were working on Melody's Line of Forbiddance in that last battle long enough for Fitch to trap the Forgotten, trap his chalklings, run and get a clock, show its gears to the Forgotten, then for Joel to run two flights of stairs, grab a bucket of acid, and return with it... I feel like even if six stick figures did actually manage to get to my line of warding, I could safely leave them there to pick away at my chalk for an hour or so while I took part in the duel.