Oudeis

For the people saying "it just releases ATP faster" I've already talked about that... your body doesn't have an infinite amount of ATP. Hoidhunter: I know that you'd still feel the effort of traveling a mile, whether that mile takes you one minute or ten. I addressed that in my first post. What I'm saying is, the cost in metabolic energy to walk across a dominance is significantly more than the food Sazed took in. He should have starved to death. Why didn't he? I get that there's some overlap in metals. Burning pewter allomantically makes your various body processes work overtime, which does have some healing effect, meaning it's a little overlapped with feruchemical gold. Cadmium changes your passage through time, so you use less food in an objective measurement, so yeah, there's a sense of overlap there. The difference is, that one makes sense. We don't have to say, "Well maybe it works like this, and then it works," we can just see "this is self-evidently and unimpeachably how it works". It's elegant, it all flows from an underlying principle, it's not a kludge tacked onto the side to try to justify a discrepancy. Whoever said it above was right; I'm just spoiled. I'm used to Mr. Sanderson making sense, and it bugs me when he doesn't.

Your body does not create energy, your body turns caloric energy in food into metabolic energy. Sazed uses steel for a solid week, covering an incredible distance (my nook is dead and charging; if someone can find the quote and put down actual numbers there's an upvote in it for you). Unless steel is creating energy out of nothing, he should have to eat enough to power his body to travel that great a distance, which would be far more food than he could possibly have on him, and he points out that the villages he passes are more likely to need food from him than to be able to provide it. I'm on the fence about accepting oxygenation, since that at least is plentiful, but I'm not wholly sure I buy it. It sounds very "comic book," lumping things in together. Steel is supposed to be physical speed; like Moogle says, if it speeds up body processes, why don't you think faster? Why don't you heal faster? It's plausible, but it's far from elegant, and it feels like a kludge. It feels less like "there's an underlying principle and all the facts arise from it" and sounds more like "I had kind of an idea, but it won't work so I'm tacking independent blocks onto it to make a frankenstein's monster." The reason Mr. Sanderson has spoiled me for other writers is because he's almost always been better than that. As has been pointed out, yes iron is a bit odd, as are the external temporal allomantic metals. Maybe the answer is just "shh don't look closer." But I hold out hope that there's a better answer to be had. My faith in Mr. Sanderson's exceptional writing skills is seldom misplaced.

The other thing to note is that steelpushes don't provide infinite force. A bullet comes at you with 300N. You're able to apply 100N of force to that bullet via steelpush; you cannot simply push to infinity the way you cannot simply lift an elephant by flexing your muscles to infinity. The bullet is still coming at you with 200N of force, enough to harm you. The other thing to note is that it's not unheard of for someone to fire bullets faster than one by one. Push on three bullets and a pretty big dude has now matched his own weight and on the fourth bullet, you're now flying backwards at ... what, 75N? Is my math right?

It's strongly implied, and suspected by me at least, that atium shadows work the way we know steellines do. Vin closes her eyes at one point and comments how she can still "see" them; it's more like information wired directly into your brain, that your brain then presents to your conscious mind in a way that makes sense to you. When Vin fights Shan, several archers fire a volley of arrows into darkness and mist they cannot see through towards sounds, and Vin dodges them without thinking while focused on Shan. This doesn't rule out the possibility of overwhelming their capacity to process, but I think it makes it pretty clear that you'd have to overwhelm them to a ludicrous degree before it would work.

I don't understand feruchemical steel. I understand a lot of it; I get that there are times you reach the limit of how fast your body can move and being able to increase that is helpful. But Sazed uses it for long-distance travel. That doesn't make any sense. If all I'm doing is walking from one end of a football field to another, could I tap steel and get there faster? Presumably because it makes my legs move faster. Except... there's already a way to make my legs move faster, and it doesn't require Investiture, it's just called sprinting. The reason I can't sprint for nine straight hours has nothing to do with a limit on how fast I can make my body move. It has to do with oxygen debt (cadmium), metabolic energy and hydration (bendalloy), and wear on my muscles (gold). So... what is steel doing? Does it provide me with energy? Where does it get the energy from? Do I have to be moving in order to store steel? If I'm storing in steel, and I move my hand over to grab a potato chip, my arm will move faster. Is it saving up metabolic energy? Do I end up using more energy than I would have if I'd reached at normal speeds, and does that metabolic energy later come back to help me when I tap steel to move? If I store steel and walk from here to my bedroom, will I find myself panting with the exertion of traveling thirty feet, and will that PO(2) be returned to me later when a day of traveling a hundred miles should be burning me through thousands of calories I don't seem to be required to eat? So then, what if I store steel but don't move? Do I get charged a flat rate of all those things just to store, and then get them back later? Except Sazed didn't seem to be suffering from shortness of breath when he was storing speed in Well of Ascension. So, was the steel he was storing only good for some things? Could it not have let him travel later? What's the difference between walking while tapping feruchemical steel, and sprinting when you're not? What is the exact mechanism by which feruchemical steel grants you the ability to cover great distances and not just improve your typing speed? A quick note: If your answer is going to be "It just lets you move faster without costing you anything", there, I saved you the trouble of posting. If your only reply is going to be, "I don't think about the inconsistencies and you shouldn't either," I and everyone else now already know what you're going to say. You won't be adding anything to the conversation, so don't waste our time by saying it again.

Unless you're talking about a different scene than me, Vin uses the pewter dust on the Inquisitors at the Rashek Shack to obscure ironlines, not atium shadows. If pewter dust could confuse atium shadows, wouldn't she not be concerned about mistborn assassins with atium like she was at the start of Well of Ascension?

Ranette addresses the idea of aluminum bullets. A Lurcher who sees you fire but doesn't see ironlines will know you're firing aluminum and will find other defenses; he's lurch himself around as you fire making himself a harder target, or something similar. The beauty of the more complicated bullet is that he'll see it's metal, believe his power will work on it, and not try to dodge as the bullet kills him. Sidenote: I wonder how Ranette feels about the idea that her skills are used exclusively to end human life. Seekers, well, if you're a Hazekiller, the idea is that you're not actually using allomancy yourself, so there's no real need to find a way to spoof their power. Also, I don't think metal in the air affects whether or not a Seeker can sense bronzepulses.

Wait, what? What's your source on this? Because we see exactly this scenario happen in the books and the exact opposite thing happens.

My concern wasn't the conclusion you eventually came to, my concern was the fact that you were, at any point in your thought process (much of which we got to read and which I did, in fact, read and comprehend fully) you were comfortable thinking to yourself that you were probably right and Sazed was probably wrong. The other "supporting arguments" as I point out gave you a couple of points of data from which you constructed a largely speculative model, and you convince yourself that the entire model carries with it the assurance of the few points of actual data you reference, then you say that means all the points contradict. And at the end, you didn't come to your senses. You didn't realize, wait a minute, I cannot, with the few scraps of information I've got, be more correct than the God specifically of this magic. My problem wasn't your conclusion. It wasn't that you eventually decided God was only a little bit wrong. My problem is your entire mindset which is totally fine with the idea that if you want to believe one thing and God says another, you have no problems whatsoever saying that God must, therefore, be wrong. You found a different flaw this time and backed away from that specific point in this specific instance, but you've since redefended the position, saying that yeah, there are totally going to be times that you're just that much better informed than God. That's what my problem was. Apropos of nothing, I'm sorry if I don't always agree with you, but I assure you, I do read your posts in their entirety. I might only respond to a few of the points, if we agree on the others or if I'm simply willing to stipulate that they're largely irrelevant (or sometimes if I realize I've just written nine thousand words and aint nobody gonna read that). And yes, there are absolutely times I'll come home after a long hard day and realize your post is... let's say comprehensive, and I'll skim it, but in those cases I will never respond, at the least I won't respond without saying something like, "I only have time to glance at this quickly but...". I would never dream of doing you the insult or disservice of disagreeing with you if I'm not going to at least read what you write and make my best effort at understanding it; I'm not going to claim I've never once misunderstood a point someone's tried to make, but I do try. I rarely agree with you but you write well, eloquently and fully, and sometimes you even cite your sources. While I'm not always happy to hear what you have to say, it's never a chore just to get through your well-organized and coherent thoughts. While it would be wonderful if we lived in a world where such traits were prevalent, they are not, and I don't mention as often as I should that I'm grateful you possess them.

You're right, we prolly already know just about everything we're ever going to learn from Scadrians. The rest of this quadrilogy, let alone the Era 3 or Era 4 trilogies, and whatever other stories may or may not get set on Scadrial in between, will prolly just be long, boring recitations of facts that we already know. Thanks for clearing this up for me, I won't bother reading them now. And for the record, no, as I said I'm not sold that there is a metaphysical reason, and I didn't say I was. I said that the set up for that moment, particularly with Wax talking about how he feels in the Mists, seems like it does mean something, we just don't know what. Perhaps someone slipped him a drug, maybe it's an effect of steel savantism. It might just be direct shardic intervention, and maybe the payoff will be Wax being upset when he realizes that Sazed has been using him as a puppet. Maybe Marsh was simply nearby, Soothing Wax's pain. That would fit the scenario perfectly. We don't actually know the very moment Marasi put up her time-bubble; maybe that stopped the Soother. There are now two mists. Mistborn are now impossible and we've got only speculation as to why; if a non allomancer could beget Vin with a skaa woman, it's ridiculous to assume that Spook's power was simply too weak to every produce a Mistborn heir, let alone all the nobles of Fadrex who survived the Final Ascension. There are fifteen alloys of atium we've never seen, and we know harmonium exists. We know direct shardic intervention can move planets but can't say "hello" to someone not pierced by metal. We know there's a mechanical way to access the metallic arts, and we know nothing about that. We know that metallic arts will one day power space travel. We know there are three hemalurgic constructs out of potentially thousands if not millions, and we have not the very first idea what rules or laws they follow. We have not been "very firmly introduced to most of the magic on Scadrial." And what's more, you know we haven't. What you're doing, whether you're able to take a step back and realize it or not, is what you always do. You start with a conclusion. You make up your mind that such-and-such is true. Then you cherry pick evidence and try to make it look like your evidence is more than it is, and when people point out that you cannot possibly be as right as you are confident, you make flippant and flat-out wrong statements dismissing everything that disagrees with you because you know you can't address it and refute it. I will never understand your compulsion to look at a question and force an answer. I do not understand why you're incapable of admitting that there is probably an answer but we don't yet have the tools to come up with it on our own. Propose theories. Speculate. Wonder. Pose rhetorical questions. Ask other people what they think. Take part in a scholarly debate where people wonder and consider and observe, comfortable with the knowledge that they might not yet have sufficient data to reach a conclusion. You don't seem to be comfortable with that scenario, so instead you say "this has to be true because I can't see another viable alternative," like you can't imagine that "we don't have the tools yet" is a viable alternative. Believe what you want. Shout it out as confidently as you can. Tell everyone that you have to be right, that admitting you don't have every fact yet isn't possible. Like I'm getting tired of telling you, you always, always do.

Remember most ground, paved or not, isn't exactly a flat surface. With the downward vector providing additional friction, even if the ground itself were slippery, coins or shell casings wouldn't necessarily travel very far laterally before simply finding something they can't get over. Asphalt might be one, but as has been said, asphalt is rare. Cobbled or paved surfaces are basically a patchwork of enormous cracks eager and willing to grab coins, shell casings, or anything else you drop and hold them tight against pretty much anything higher than a direct vertical push. My feet aren't directly below my center of gravity, especially when I walk. When I walk, most of the time, I've only got one foot on the ground as my weight shifts all over the place. Front, back, a bit to the side. The ground does a decent job, most of the time, of keeping my foot in one position as long as the vector is mostly downwards, just like a steelpush would be.

Okay, well, you're someone reading a book and Sazed is currently the God with a mind widened beyond human comprehension around whose power the very art we are discussing was crafted. As soon as you're willing to agree that if you directly contradict him, he's axiomatically right, I will return to this discussion with you. If you're willing to take flat-out statements from the book and say that they have to be wrong simply because you've decided otherwise and you're more right than the book is, then there's obviously no point in my continuing to talk to you. You're going to choose to ignore anything I say that you don't like, regardless of how factual or supported it is, and if anyone out there is still willing to listen to you after your "I'm right and Sazed is wrong" argument they're clearly not going to listen to reason, either.

It's an in-character comment but as I said, it's not just someone saying, "oh, I bet the Steel Ministry prolly doesn't know it exists." Sazed says that the breeding program has stopped checking for feruchemists, and as evidence he points out that it was easy to sneak Tindwyl into the program with her copperminds brazen on her arms because no one was going to check, because as far as they knew all feruchemists were eliminated. I mean... sure, it's not a confirmed polygraph test from the Lord Ruler himself confirming that he believed himself the last living feruchemist, but it's some pretty strong evidence for you to dismiss as fully as you seem to be doing by claiming it's nothing but one character's mistaken impression. It's the impression of a man who was once a member of the secret society responsible for successfully committing espionage on the exact breeding program that we're currently talking about, it's not Elend talking about what he thinks life was prolly like for a plantation skaa. It's incredibly well-informed opinion, is what I'm saying. If that's not strong enough evidence to get you to at least consider it rather than dismissing it in its entirety, I honestly don't know what would be strong enough. While I agree that there's "no need" for the measures to continue, I stipulate that depending on what you mean by "need" there was never a real "need". I bring this up to point out that the "need" has always been subjective. Now there's a "need" for stability, which means to not change anything unless there's a "need" to change it, and there's a "need" among the nobility for the luxury of having a Terris steward. Bureaucracy. Once something is going, it takes something stronger than "there's no more need for it" before it gets dismantled. Sazed also specifically mentioned that "compounding" meant, not just tapping a reserve, but tapping it faster than it had been stored, which results in an inefficient draw. I don't know what else to tell you; the same term has been used in-book to refer to two different but very similar things and it's confusing to all of us. The Lord Ruler did want to exterminate all feruchemists, which was why he exterminated all feruchemists. Every single living feruchemist (with the exception of Kwaan) was turned into a mistwraith at the moment of his Ascension. If he'd had a better understanding of genetics, feruchemy would prolly have successfully been ended that day, apart from himself. You say "it's just too useful." He let some of his Inquisitors have gold feruchemy, but he deliberately kept them from the other powers, because he didn't want them to be too powerful or "useful," he wanted to be it. The premise for the Final Empire was "I am the Lord thy God." He called it "the Final Empire" because he believed he himself would be the single most powerful being for all time and no one could ever topple him and he'd hold the empire together with his bare hands if he had to and he had the power to make it possible. He wanted power, and he didn't want anyone else to have it. Apart from your personal belief that "feruchemy is useful and I personally would want it around" you've not given us any evidence to suggest that the Lord Ruler himself did want it around or find a use for it. He used feruchemy himself, enhanced with his undiluted allomantic strength, and that was all the power or usefulness he expected anyone or anything to need for all the rest of time. We have strong evidence from the text suggesting the opposite. If you've got something concrete, then by all means I clamor to hear it. If you're just going to tell us what you'd do if you were the Lord Ruler... well, there's a place for that, too.

That was fascinating, well-cited, informative, and interesting. I only regret I'm only allowed to upvote it once. I wish more people would disprove my crazy theories so well, with such concrete facts and well-supported arguments, not to mention your friendly and civil tone.

But bendalloyminds prolly don't store the ATP. They store the energy which causes the ATP to revert back to the lower-energy ADP. Presumably. I've already stipulated to cadmiumminds, even though we have no real idea on how it works. It does seem most likely that it stores the actual oxygen molecules. Iron is seriously weird. It very much does not store your mass because it does not change your density. It doesn't store weight because unless it's changing the gravitational constant the only way to change your weight is by changing your mass and it doesn't do that. And it doesn't store either because we have WoB that it doesn't really store either. Personally my suspicion is that it's something spiritual like the Gravitation Surge that simply breaks the laws of physics in ways we don't yet understand, but doesn't require the loss of actual volumes of physical material. Pewter is an interesting one, though I wonder what's truly happening there. So we've got pewter and prolly cadmium, and the water half of bendalloy. That's three. And you suggest copper because... wow. I just don't even know how to respond to the argument that "memories take up space in our brain." I just... wow. So that's three. Four if you're right and Mr. Sanderson is wrong on iron. I think we're a little shy of "almost everything that Feruchemy stores involves mass in some way." Call me an empiricist.

Some confusion seems to arise from the fact that Mr. Sanderson himself uses "compound" to refer both to someone allomantically burning a feruchemical store, and the simple act of drawing out feruchemical traits faster than they were stored. Beard, you were referring to the former, and you're correct, most Inquisitors prolly could not do that. Voidus was referring (I presume) to the latter, and without otherwise endorsing his (her?) argument which I continue to disagree with, I confirm that he (she?) is using the term right; it's the term's own fault for being confusing.

The Steel Ministry is convinced that feruchemy has successfully been bred out of the population, which is why Tindwyl was able to sneak into the breeding program, use her feruchemy in front of everyone, and not get caught, as is expressly stated in Well of Ascension. As has also been expressly stated in WoB, those pewter spikes have not been refreshed in quite some time and have suffered decay over the centuries. Regardless of other circumstances, any modern day Inquisitor would store health less quickly, to a great extent, than a normal feruchemist. Source.

Thank you, ccstat! It's too bad that the medical application isn't all I'd hoped, but it's nice to know the science behind it. I do have a follow-up question. You mention that it would only be effective if you could somehow detect the early stages of infection; what if you use it prophylactically? Take a five hour plane ride, guy on public transportation sneezes on you, your significant other gets the flu. Every time something happens where it's likely you just caught something, you go ahead and burn yourself a decent fever for an hour. Maybe only one in ten times were you actually gonna catch something, but you've got plenty of heat from last summer where you wore your brassminds instead of turning on the AC. Do you think such a regimen would reduce how often you actually get sick? I also have a further question about fevers. How does your body regulate the temperature? Does it somehow check my own temperature and reduce the heat when it gets to the right temp, or does my body check things like infections and determine: Put x energy into a fever for z period of time? What I'm really asking is this. If I feel a fever coming on and tap brass, will my body notice that my heat has increased, and therefore subside its own fever, or will it still increase my temperature because it only knows that regardless of my body's actual temperature, when I've got an infection it needs to make me hotter? I have a whole new section of questions to add to my Questions for Mr. Sanderson list.

...Huh? You're talking about one feruchemist training another, and forcing him to do feruchemy wrong based on faulty assumuptions? You think the default of pewter feruchemy is to let you weaken or strengthen specific bits of your body, but that somehow lost in time people decided to ignore that and start only using it for the full body, and that every since people have been instinctively using it correctly to focus on parts of the body but that in 100% of cases, the teachers are so utterly terrible at teaching that they successfully trick/force their students to learn the wrong way to use feruchemy, unnaturally restricting their abilities? And that the student himself will under no circumstance say, "Okay but, I can feel I've now got a reserve, so I must've done something right, also I fell over just now when my foot could no longer support my weight, so I know you're telling me I'm doing it wrong but you should really look at my foot." In a world where Wax manages to invent a steelbubble when he himself admits it shouldn't be possible, in a world where a thousand years of repressed exploratory urge and suddenly unleashed on a magic that hasn't been available to the common people until right now, in a world where God himself is a feruchemist and within his first hour of divinity he's written a letter to his buddy saying, "Hey, here's some information on the metallic arts," I find it unlikely in the extreme that the various byzantine machinations your theory requires before it's even plausible, ignoring the fact that the best support you've been able to garner for it is "not totally proven false," all happen to be true. That said, I'm never going to tell anyone to stop believing something about a fantasy book that they wish to believe. I'm simply pointing out that, outside of your headcanon, it's extremely unlikely to be the actual case.

Excellent question, and the one on my mind. I suspect we won't know until someone asks him or it comes up in a book. I actually wonder what happens to the physical food or water when you store/tap bendalloy. Best i can figure, you don't store from actual food, you store from metabolic energy within your system, meaning the entire process with food would go as it ever does, through elimination, and once the metabolic energy is stored in your body as ATP you can transfer it to a bendalloymind. Water is a far different scenario. Does the water magically vanish from your system, to be magically restored later? That I know of, no other feruchemical metal actually stores something that has physical mass, not even the thing that stores something which is a bit like mass and a bit like weight but isn't really either. Where does the water go? At what point does it vanish? are there side effects to mass being destroyed and created within the biome of your body? EDIT: Metal storing mass: Cadmium, bendalloy's pair, depending on how it works, may or may not store air molecules. Goldminds store health which can let you regenerate mass, but it just hijacks the body's own process that turns food into more you, so that's not really the same thing.

Ah. This is what made me add the following paragraph, but I forgot why so I never went back and edited to make the connection more clear. Thank you for pointing it out. What I intended to convey way, Wayne cannot store the health of his foot while his arm heals at a normal pace. Wayne is as great an expert at his metal as you're pretty well like to find. If he can't do something that every keeper was able to do easily with copper, I think we have to concede that it was a trait of copper, not a trait of "people with a lot of practice in one specific metal". For the people out there who do think Sazed could store specific memories only because he'd practiced or gotten the right trick to copper, what exactly do you think he stored while he was practicing, before he was able to do it so specifically?

I see the question you're asking, and I suspect the answer is no. Personally, I don't think this is one of those "however you see yourself" magics, but the argument in favor is that if you personally "see" the metal as "part of you" you should be able to store its weight. I see no evidence to assume that feruchemy acts as "think of a thing and it happens" in this case, especially since Sazed mentioned that it doesn't store the weight of clothes. Surely they are as much "a part of you" as earrings are. "Metal inside someone" is immune to steel and iron because contact with your blood makes your body's innate Investiture surround it, protecting it from the influence of unboosted iron and steel. It's not because the allomancy stops seeing the metal as metal and starts seeing it as "part of a body and therefore not metal". Unless you meant that metal in your body can be an allomantic reserve, in which case I don't know.

Eeeeeeh... I'm not willing to buy your interpretation of feruchemical tin. I just don't think the models match up. I think storing a specific memory would be analogous to storing a specific sight; i.e., you "store" and go blind for a short while, then later when you tap you suddenly experience the visual sensations of whatever happened before your eyes at the time you stored. To support this, I point out that you require different tinminds per sense, whereas you can store each individual memory all in one coppermind. ... Okay as I write this I realize I'm not sure where I got that from, I'm gonna look it up. I'm certain in Well of Ascension Sazed mentions having rings for each individual sense; I'm not sure he actually flat-out says it's required, or he just finds it neater to organize this way. I will return when I have quotes. Speaking of, I had meant to return earlier when I found this quote, and it completely slipped my mind. My apologies. Source. I guess now we're going to debate the potential meanings of "has been required." I think you have to take more wiggle room than this quote leaves you to assume that it's as simple as "but if he'd thought he could, it would've been easy." As further evidence, I point out that Wayne has only one feruchemical power, which gets used a lot in his line of work. If he's not as good with feruchemical gold as Sazed was with feruchemical copper, he's gotta be close. And he points out that due to his broken arm, he can store no health whatsoever. If it were possible for someone an expert in their specific feruchemical metal to simply get his mind right to store specific health the way Sazed can store specific memories, Wayne would have been able to do it. Further, I think we can reasonably assume that health is stored generally, not specifically. Otherwise, Wayne would have to have a couple of hundred goldminds. "This is the hand storeroom. Right side is right hand, left side is left hand. The first shelf is where I store the health of my hands not being shot, to tap when my hand gets shot. Second shelf is my hands not being burned. Third is cuts, fourth is bites, five is hand-cancer." He just stores general health and then it gets used as magical, impossible regenerative abilities. I'm honestly not entirely sure what point I was trying to make with this; something either you or I said made me think of it but now I can't think of what it was. But I think the point is a good one, even if it's non-germane, so I'm just gonna leave it.

As the only other contestant, can I express how not at all surprised I am. Sidenote: I cheated. That was not my hand-drawn aon. It was hand-drawn by a friend of mine, a Mr. Brandon Sanderson. He signed my copy of The Emperor's Soul, and I asked him to personalize it by drawing the Aon Rao with the chasm line. Rest assured, he's aware that there's a reason other people do his artwork for him, and I don't think we'd have to tell him there were only two contestants to not surprise him to learn he came dead last in an Aon drawing contest.

Almost definitely not. Copper can store specific memories and is so far the only canon metal to work that way. You cannot use gold to store the health of your lymph nodes and not your broken foot, you cannot tap pewter to get one stronger arm than the other.