Oudeis

Oh certainly, I didn't mean to imply that this was a surefire way to kill off any infection. Just one option that would let you avoid a lot of sick time and some of the worst side effects of a fever, if you're both in control of the fever and gaining the slight feruchemical edge to it.

Well, presumably, if we can use Words of Radiance spoilers Further, I question that this "protection" is absolute. I need to find the quote again but I believe it was said that feruchemy will, to an extent, protect you from some of the effects. Wayne can tap enough weight that it should kill him and won't, but he'll still be moving around very slowly. Do we know, for sure, that there's no upper limit? If he'd been standing on the ground supporting his own weight on his own legs when he tapped all the weight like he did to destroy that building, do we know that wouldn't have been beyond the limits of what feruchemy can save you from? When he lay on the floor, tapped all that weight to fall through to avoid the explosion, didn't he release the weight as he was falling, so that he wouldn't suffer the energy passing into his body as all that weight smashed into the ground below him and suddenly stopped? I'm saying that we have no way to know that you simply categorically cannot be injured due to tapping a lot of some trait, and some reason to suspect that you can. Based on that, even if a virus did get some protection from being "part of you", that should just mean it will take more heat to kill it, not that it's immune to your own heat. Fevers work because it takes less heat to kill the virus than the person, so the window should still exist, it might just be higher. And recall Sazed tapping tin that time to spy on the koloss. (I tried, and failed, to think of more words starting with T I could use in that sentence). His telescopic sight increased, but too much of it caused him vertigo. I'm simply mentioning this to point out that we know for a fact you don't get blanket immunity from your own feruchemy; there are and can always be downsides. For example, while you might be unable to literally burn yourself to death with brass, do you dehydrate faster? Do you sweat more, could you do yourself harm that way?

Do you think feruchemical brass can be used to kill off an infection by simulating a fever? Deliberately burn yourself at 105 degrees for 45 minutes, kill off the infection, then stop tapping to return yourself instantly to normal. Anyone out there with legitimate medical knowledge wanna weigh in?

Who wants to take this one?

Trying to find... I feel like I've seen a WoB that they're bound by mass, that spren cannot manifest bigger than about the size of a human.

yeah... first, to reiterate, he's got instinctive knowledge of basic commands, so obscure ones won't automatically work. Second, "flight" requires a lot more than just "something wing-shaped." Apart from the "knowing exactly how to move your wings to achieve flight" which has been brought up already, wings have specific shapes and compositions; different types of feathers grow at different sections of the wing, air travels above and below the wing in specific ways. Not to mention wingspan; a bird's wingspan is very big compared to the rest of their profile, and that's for something with hollow bones and a body designed for flight. Humans really, really aren't designed for flight. You'd need a wingspan WAY bigger than a ripped cloak to even start thinking about providing enough lift. Even if you actually did construct fifteen feet wide, specially designed wings... I still feel like until you independently know how to fly, on your own, you cannot Command wings to do so. But I could be wrong. Keep in mind that "instinctive knowledge of Command" doesn't mean instinctive knowledge of the thought behind it; it's referencing the fact that the commands themselves have to be specific. It's mentioned briefly in the book, I believe, but it doesn't come up often, that your visualization could be perfect; if you use the wrong vocabulary, nothing will happen. For reasons we don't yet understand, some words work as Commands, and some don't. The "Instinctive Knowledge" is, if you get the visualization right, you instinctively know which words to use to turn it into a Command. I believe, at least.

Keep in mind the Words of Founding. Classic Scadrial had a rich and diverse history and series of cultures stretching back at least a thousand years. The Keepers protected what knowledge they could, but it was supressed during the Final Empire. It would have been released in the Words of Founding. Now, there's presumably a lot. Maybe it's taken 300 years for someone to study enough of the books on music, try to translate the ink on paper into music in the air, craft the instruments correctly, practice until they replicated the sounds, then perform in enough out-of-the-way joints until this "new" old music finally caught on... my point is, jazz might not have developed as a result of the Final Empire. It could be something that came about because of something in Scadrial's distant past which only now has resurfaced, developed under circumstances far closer to the Earth-analogue that produced jazz. Also... maybe I'm musically dumb. The person asking the question says, "Do they have jazz?" and the answer is, "Wayne hears some brass." Am I the only one who thinks it's a bit of a leap to assume that this was confirmation of the premise of the original question? Maybe Brandon intended to convey, "While obviously they don't have jazz specifically as we'd know it on earth, Wayne is about to hear a brass band replicating something that's as close to jazz as you could reasonably expect on an alien world."

You're modeling this as though it's copper or what some people think of things like aluminum, and I think what little we know proves that it is not. Storing specific friendships is like storing specific memories, and when you tap memories, you don't turn past memories into a new capacity to remember stuff, you simply recall the old memories. If you were storing specific friendships, then in the future when you tap them you'd only be increasing those specific friendships. What little we have in-text about duralumin tells us, "...can tap it at a later time in order to speedily form trust relationships with others." That seems pretty clear to me that it's saying stored connection can be used on people who weren't already your friends. Your analogy sounds like you're saying you could only store tin if you're currently seeing things, then use it later to see whole new things, when the way tin works, you instead store your capacity to see things, even if your eyes are closed or you're in a dark room. But, the spiritual metals are the least known about, feruchemically, so it's entirely possible they actually do function in a manner unlike anything we've ever seen.

Not to belabor a point others are making, but "maintaining the status quo" is only easy if no one is trying to change the status quo. It's like saying surfing is the easiest sport ever, because all you have to do is keep standing in one position on a plank. Compared to the politican factions and armed uprisings and secret societies like the Synod of the final empire, simply having to counteract all the chaos the ocean throws at you is prolly a walk in the park. He's literally running an entire civilization. Being in charge of that is never going to be easy.

Per the example I cited, that's one possible interpretation. I'll restate it. Two gemstones might lose Stormlight at the same rate. If one is bigger, and they're both filled to capacity with stormlight, the larger one will retain more stormlight for a longer period of time, even at the same rate of decay. I state my case again. You have no grounds, based on that quote, to assume that he means size affects rate of decay, rather than how great a charge it could initially start with. Quick note that you leave off the very next sentence, which sorta disproves your theory. "...left her twice as good at burning bronze as a typical Mistborn. And that let her see through the copperclouds of lesser Allomancers." It doesn't say "she was twice as strong. For a moment. At birth. Then years later almost the entirety of the charge wasted away and she barely had any boost at all. And that's why she could pierce copperclouds." I disagree with your argument, based on points I've already brought up. Hemalurgic decay is fast enough that seconds matter. Marsh comments that the spike placed into penrod is, from a power perspective, all but worthless. Vin's earring, after years of decay, shouldn't be providing anything but the smallest possible measure of boost to her bronze. And yet... she pierces copperclouds As you've said, not all allomancers are at to-the-iota same level of power. After a thousand years, strong bloodlines and weak bloodlines, you'd expect a prevalent degree of disparity between the "power levels" of Mistings. However strong Vin is naturally, if she was simply an iota away from being able to pierce copperclouds, it would be a common occurrence for slightly strong Seekers to routinely pierce slightly weak Copperclouds, and everyone would know it was a matter of power, not assume it's binary the way they do. Vin has to have a sizable boost to power, and given a tiny earring and years of decay, that's simply not plausible. Something had to have happened to prevent the years of neglect from becoming years of decay. You seem to be right... I just read that chapter this morning, and I swear there had been something about how he wasn't getting any power, but power wasn't the point, they just wanted Ruin to begin to influence him. But now I cannot find the passage. I concede that we don't know it was worthless, but Marsh still makes a big deal about how it's been decaying for days. I find it difficult to believe days matter, but years don't. Your footnote talks about how we don't know enough about the numbers, yet here you assume that hemalurgic spikes steal 100% of a human's might. Maybe one fully charged spike only gives you 60%. But that's not important. What is important is, while we don't know the actual, specific amounts of power lost, we do know that seconds matter. If a few seconds lose enough power to matter in the slightest, I cannot accept that the same spikes can sit in a hole decaying for months, and still grant (at most) more than half their power each. If the decay rate is so phenomenally slow, why do they go to efforts, building tables with indents, if they're only saving the tiniest fraction of power? It doesn't scan. I'm not saying Mr. Sanderson is wrong. As I so often do, however, I point out that you're ignoring that the quote could mean what you say, but there are other, obvious, just as valid explanations. As I've said, as the books mention time after time, seconds matter. Let's say an Inquisitor with one of the health spikes does die. If it takes them five minutes to recover the spike, find either the Inquisitor next in line for health, or some random victim who can be imbued with feruchemical gold to cap off the power until it gets passed along, that is significant loss. There's absolutely nothing in the WoB which says, "And the Inquisitors didn't bother sticking it in someone while they transfered the power because that would have made it more efficient." It would be inconsistent with the fact that we see in the text that seconds matter. If the loss is only 10% a year, it would be simpler and easier for the Inquisitors to kill someone on one table and stab the host on the next table; the barely-perceptible fraction of power lost would not be worth the effort of constructing special furniture, not to mention the risk; if either the donor spasms during death or the host twitches at all, the spikes have to be placed on something as thin as a nerve; if the power loss weren't significant, wouldn't the intelligent choice be to steal it, and then drive it into the host when the host doesn't have a twitching fresh corpse voiding its bowels all over the host? You sorta dance around this topic, so please answer the question. Do you agree that seconds matter? Do you think the text states that it's best to drive a spike through one person and into another expressly because the seconds it would take to do it any other way would result in a noteworthy loss of power? Because I cannot see how you can claim that spikes left out for years could retain any sort of noticeable charge at all, yet also acknowledge, as it's written in the books, that wasting seconds wastes measurable amounts of power.

I don't really have an alternative, and I don't see why one is necessary. Adrenaline frankly fits, but there's clearly something important going on there, and if it turns out to be simple adrenaline that would be a let down. I'm not as comfortable as you are relying on inference about the mists suddenly disappearing when there's no good reason for them to do so, or dismissing Wax's comments how this is how he always feels in the mists, or deciding that hemalurgic decay means a spike will stop granting strength but still grant endurance. Basically, I need something more than "I personally don't know what the answer is, so I'm just going to assume my personal speculation is correct." I recognize that my own speculation is just that; speculation. I don't need to say "this is what it probably is," I'm comfortable saying, "It might be one of these possibilities, or it might be something I haven't thought of/haven't had revealed to me yet." I remember the first book, where we learned that Vin could pierce copperclouds, but didn't yet have enough information to even begin to guess why that might be. That experience tells me that sometimes we get the mysteries before we're given the tools to solve them. I don't need to wait for a viable alternative, I can look at an idea and say, "this simply doesn't fit, so it's probably not true" without feeling compelled to assume that I do, in fact, know the answer. So my alternative is this. In a year, when the rest of the quadrilogy comes out, we'll prolly be given the clues we need to determine what went on here. Until then, I don't feel the same compulsion you do to insist on an explanation which clearly doesn't fit, then claim it's the right one because nothing else fits better.

Per your instructions, I've replied to your comments on general hemalurgy in the appropriate thread. Even though you chose to address them here. As to the "on topic"... does the book state that the mists actually do leave just before Wax suddenly feels the pain crash in on him? I also don't see why Wax would get the endurance of pewter, but not the strength or grace of pewter in order to fight back; Vin's examples show her facing down people very large, either a huge man who beats her when she has barely any pewter herself, and even that lasts only a few seconds, or facing people who themselves have pewter. Imagine if Vin, burning pewter, were fighting Miles. She'd wipe the floor with him. His power would keep him from actually keeping any of the damage, but his skill, strength, and height and weight advantage over her would mean nothing. She'd pick him up and throw him against the wall several times. When he went to grab or kick her, she'd simply dodge, too fast for him to adjust, powered by pewter. Vin chose not to fight back against Camon because, as she explains, fighting back and winning wouldn't help her, fighting back and losing would kill her. Wax could easily have used his strength, speed and grace to get Miles into a basic armbar and just sit there holding him while Marasi flared cadmium for five or ten minutes until morning (and the conners) came. Wax did try to fight back, and he failed. He wouldn't have failed if he were enhanced by pewter. Vin could've beaten Miles, and without powers the disparity between them was huge. Wax is a big, tough guy himself, with years of fighting experience. The difference between him and Miles is comparatively slight. With any increase in strength and grace, I don't understand how Wax still loses, when he's clearly trying to win. See his various punches and attacks; he didn't decide that sit down and take it was the best idea, if he'd had the option of winning the fight, he'd've won the fight. All he needed was Miles to stay in the circle. Constantly breaking his legs, and every time he gets four feet closer to the edge just pick him up and body slam him back to the center, would have worked perfectly. The specific plan was the constables, but... why? The constables win because, together, they are strong enough to hold Miles down. There's nothing the constables together can do that one Thug couldn't also do. So, if Wax can just win, why doesn't he? Pewter is like tin. Tin can only enhance all of your senses; it can't enhance just one. Pewter can't just give you endurance without power or speed; it gives you all or none. If you're so sure Wax has pewter, why doesn't the pewter make him any stronger, or faster, or more graceful? Per the book: "Miles showed a flash of amusement through the annoyance. He took a few of the punches, Wax's fist growing sore in the process." Does this sound like pewter-enhanced strength to you? "Wax got to his feet and rammed a fist into Miles's kidney. It didn't even get a grunt." Wax isn't faking. Even if Miles doesn't feel pain, even if the damage would have healed, Miles doesn't weigh any more than he should. A pewter-fueled punch to the center of his gravity should have, at the very least, shoved him forward, if not toppled him over or even sent him flying. And... just re-read the bit about the pain all crashing down on him. Yet, no mention of the mists fleeing. Was it mentioned in the books that the mists stay "all night"? Not only was the night hours from over when the pain crashed down on him, but it was within a speed bubble, so there wasn't actually time for the mist to leave. "Wax managed to get in one thrashing swing that connected. And did nothing." Miles heals, but isn't impervious. A pewter-enhanced haymaker would have broken bones, even if those bones healed a moment later. Not "nothing". Interesting addition: From chapter 19. "Wax's leg was throbbing, his face scraped up, but he felt surprisingly good. He always felt that way, in the mists." Worth noting that Wax rarely if ever wears his earring; if your contention is that the earring gives him pewter, and Harmony is fueling it via mists, why does he feel the boost constantly, whether or not he's got the earring in? Based on this, even if he is stronger/faster/tougher/what have you, it's the mists that do it, independent of his earring. Your case that it's because of the earring and the mists at the same time doesn't hold water.

This from a different thread; in an attempt to not de-rail that discussion, I'm replying here. I've read the passage, from Chapter 42 of Hero of Ages. I disagree with your assertion that this is the only thing it could mean. In context, he could have been saying a larger spike would have taken a far greater charge, like how a huge gemheart will last longer in the Weeping than a sphere, not because it loses Stormlight any slower, but because it simply started with more to lose. As for the "precision" of the Hero of Ages saying "twice" versus "nearly twice", I find myself on the opposite side of the discussion I was just having with Voidus. If the process of making an inquisitor loses a bit of power, and thus Marsh's Bronze rating is at 198% power, whereas Vin's less efficient method maybe lost even more, so she's got 195% power, I think you're splitting hairs that in what essentially was a note from one man to his friend, claiming it's inconsistent that he'd generalize 195% to "twice". If I ran a race in thirty minutes and my buddy ran it in sixteen and a half, I'd prolly tell our friends he ran it twice as fast as I did, not that his time was fifty-five percent of mine. My point is, Sazed was being correct and truthful, but made no promises to be held to standards of exactness or accuracy. "Twice" was close enough for his purposes. I'm not questioning your W's-o-B supporting your argument that any spike outside of a body for any length of time will degrade. However I am pointing out two inconsistencies and asking how you reconcile them with the model you propose. Vin's earring was out of her ear for literally years, when we're concerned about seconds in making an Inquisitor, and Marsh admits that the spike he's had for a few weeks before implanting it in Penrod is practically useless. Also, TenSoon leaves OreSuer's Blessing of Potency hidden away, outside of a body, for months. Until used in conjuction within a kandra, Blessings, that we know of, are no different than any other spike. They're just two bars of iron charged with physical might via the death of a human. Why, then, after months, do they still grant him their power? He mentions that every muscle swells to more than double power. If a few weeks is all it takes for a spike granting copper to wither to nothingness, how can iron spikes still be viable after months? Personally, I find my evidence compelling. From past experience trying to change your mind, I think I can reasonably guess that you will not. We have two recent W's-o-B, telling us expressly from Mr. Sanderson himself that he sometimes gets stuff wrong and we shouldn't trust him on obscure stuff, whereas the books are vetted and edited and checked against the Wiki. I humbly suggest that the W's-o-B you reference are, like Harmony's comment about how powerful Vin is, correct but inexact; the argument you express is, "He doesn't add a qualifier, therefore we have to assume it is true in every circumstance, unqualified," whereas I think "under most circumstances" was just as implied by his statement as the "nearly" was implied in the Hero of Ages's epigraph. I know none of this will convince you, but I'm explaining my side of the argument in case people are following. You talk about people being used to "cap off" powers, and how the fact that we never see it is proof that it's impossible. Can you point out to me a missed opportunity? The three times that are even close to "on screen" that we see power transferred when the point is to transfer power, two of them are to grant power to an Inquisitor (once when Marsh flashes back to his own rebirth, and another time, I believe near the start of the third book, where the Inquisitors are stealing feruchemical traits) and the third is Vin's mom killing her sister to grant Vin the earring. In all three cases, the spike was transferred in a manner that could not have been made more efficient by transferring the power to someone else in the meantime. The only other spike we actually see is the Penrod one. From Marsh's perspective, he mentions several things that could have been done differently if the point were to grant Penrod more power, and flat-out says that granting Penrod the power isn't the point. So again. Please support your argument by providing us with an example of a time that the "capping" could have been used, and would have been something desirable, but deliberately was not. Otherwise, your argument that "it can't happen because we never see it happen" doesn't hold water, because there's no reason for it to have happened. That's like saying the local physics of Scadrial make sailing impossible, because we've never seen someone sail. Well, yes, but we've also never seen a situation where someone would have sailed, if possible. It's not conspicuous in its absence, because its presence would have been out-of-place. As ever, I'm not trying to say that you're not allowed to simply believe what you want to, without reason. However, unless you provide a reason, you have to agree that simply deciding what to believe is what you're doing.

I happen to subscribe to this theory. (about halfway through this admittedly very long post) I still think there's a few unanswered questions regarding Wax's earring. Three hundred years passed, and how many different hemalurgic hosts for that one earring? Does it work differently if the current host is not the original host? It might be as simple as "decay stops, forever, the instant any one person bonds the spike, regardless of what happens thereafter." I'd be a little surprised if that were the case.

The general impression I get from various implications throughout the text is that technically there's an upper limit, but you need an insane amount of any given trait before you would fill up a small bracelet. His copperminds were huge, but I seem to recall a mention somewhere, either when Sazed talks about getting his own copperminds or when he talks about transfering them to Tindwyl, that the copperminds have months if not years of memories of just the recitation of books. So... a lot, is what I'm saying.

Epigraph of chapter 73, Hero of Ages. The rest of the epigraph, and the epigraph of chapter 45, might shed a bit of context if you're really interested, but my heat is busted and my fingers are too cold to transcribe. Granted, this could have been the Hero of Ages making a generalization. I could see justification that the spike degraded as much as it was gonna, and that at a minimum it was still enough to let her pierce copperclouds. However, on balance, without compelling reason I see no reason to doubt someone in a position to know exactly how hemalurgy works, who had no real reason to obfuscate the truth when "just enough of a boost to pierce copperclouds" would have been just as easy to say. I admit it's not a slam dunk. I could see someone remaining a bit skeptical. I'm not sure I think anything less believing than skeptical is a reasonable interpretation of the text, however.

Why I disagree with your implication that one must be the "hero" to be smart, I happen to agree that Rashek himself likely didn't start off as the sharpest marble in the cookie jar. I'm not sure how much that should matter, however. A thousand years of experience probably makes one about as smart as one needs to be.

Blaze: While I see what you're saying, I'm less certain than you are that the WoB is the slam-dunk you imply that the system acts independently of Endowment's will. It could merely be saying that Endowment his/herself has prerequisites. That said, I still agree that it's a formalized system. I think we've got other W's-o-B about how arcana work, period, and that while Shards have strong influence in them, this influence is non-absolute. My personal head-canon model is that certain conditions must be met, including prerequities in how the person dies that Endowment cannot easily overcome. Then Endowment selects from this pool of people which ones to Invest with the Divine Breath. Then the actual person gets to decide to either Return or not. Obviously Direct Shardic Intervention could likely circumvent this process (on the assumption that there are few enough things Direct Shardic Intervention cannot do), but I imagine there are downsides from a Shardic point of view for doing so.

Well... I'm personally not as sure as other people that it was allomantic pewter, but this unfortunately is not a good reason it can't be. We know charges in hemalurgic spikes deplete when they're out of a body, but we also know Vin's earring worked at near full-power despite being out of her body for years; the Era 1 trilogy makes it seem as though seconds matter. We do know that there are circumstances that cause hemalurgic spikes to lose power, but it's also obvious that other circumstances cause them not to lose power. Also, Ruin was able to power hemalurgy the way Preservation could fuel allomancy, so perhaps the answer is simply "God did it". What exactly is the case made for the spike granting pewter? I seem to recall people saying it was how long he survived being beaten up by Miles, but wasn't that after the mists had left? Or something about him carrying his own guns while heavy, but didn't he raise his arms high over his head while really heavy at the wedding?

This is officially dead now, right? If it were going to get rescheduled, we'd've heard something by now, yes?

Referencing the quote Moogle posted... That always struck me as odd. Inquisitors aren't made out of skaa, or even muggle Nobles. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they all made from Mistings? Now, it's obviously no guarantee that a Misting will have an allomancer child. I suppose he's simply answering the underlying question? i.e. he's ignoring the fact that all Inquisitors are a subset of Mistings, and answering the question as it was asked by Sirce, which was, can someone with a hemalurgically granted metalborn power pass it on. Is that more-or-less everyone else's take on the question? Throwing this out there just to avoid any possible confusion: I'm not trying to say that only Mistings could ever become Inquisitors, I'm simply saying that I believe all (or at the very least nearly all) Inquisitors were chosen from Mistings. There were never all that many Inquisitors, and they had the entire Steel Ministry to choose their "interns" from, and from what Marsh told us (and I think there was an epigraph in Hero of Ages, perhaps?) they prioritized Mistings, especially Seekers, so as to make more powerful Inquisitors. Basically, they wanted certain traits, and so few people were selected from such a large pool that the Inquisitors had the option of selecting people with not only the desirable traits, but allomancy to boot. And didn't Marsh express that despite some teething troubles, the fact that he was a Seeker was a more-or-less trump card getting the various Cantons to fight over him?

Ehh..... just a minor point of clarification. Actual comets are made of ice, but there are plenty of astral-body comet-shaped things which are made of metal, so the point is valid. Eshonai just doesn't know her astronomy very well and uses the wrong term. Thank you for the shout-out for my blood theory! (The most recent name is because my Greek buddy didn't like the transliteration system I was using, he says anyone who actually speaks Greek will have an easier time with Oudeis than Outis). Pointing out, yes Shallan's first Soulcast was to blood, but that's because she was holding the garnet Kabsal gave her, and Soulcasting cares which gem you get your Stormlight from. Could be coincidence, could be thematic, or maybe something about her Lightweaver nature made Kabsal choose to use a garnet lantern that day for light. Back to Eshonai's spren... Spren are shaped by human thought. So if her spren really is supposed to represent metal the way the other spren we've seen so far mimic their Essence, and it appears as an asteroid, does this imply that enough people realize that rocks falling from the sky sometimes contain metal to be in the zeitgeist? Then again, I'm still not sure why rain means candles with eyeballs, so not every spren is a direct connection to what people actually envision when they think of the thing.

Sounds a bit tautological. We assume they didn't make up Copper, and your reasoning is that we have no evidence of them making anything up. If you won't accept Copper as something they made up, because of the lack of something like Copper they made up, then providing you with further evidence won't convince you. For anyone else reading this, I'm gonna point out that Bendalloy Savants lose "Charm" for some reason when they stop burning, and Cadmium Savants lose social influence (possibly because to become a cadmium savant you have to skip over enough time that most people who remember you are now ten years older). Granted, those have not yet been proven wrong, since we haven't yet had time to prove them wrong. For a fact in the book that was made up and is proven wrong, the burn rate of Duralumin uses up an entire charge all at once, a clear contradiction of how it works in the books. Or, for that matter, pretty much the entirety of how Copper Feruchemy is explained. There's more, but I think my case has been made. I'm not saying "they are absolutely, definitely wrong" but we've got at least two W's-o-B that I know of telling us not to trust anything written in the Treatise Metallurgic that's unconfirmed by the books. Obviously, this being unconfirmed, believe what you want. I just find "a bunch of unconfirmed information hasn't been proven wrong yet" a specious argument for "we should assume it's true," especially when some unconfirmed information has, in fact, been proven wrong. You can split hairs if you want and say "nothing fundamental like the entire use of a metal has been proven wrong," but you're the one who said: "I don't recall any precedent for them just flat-out making up abilities/effects" so I've provided some abilities and effects they just flat-out made up. If you'd like to now change your argument, feel free. Finally, we get someone with the Blessing of Presence as a main viewpoint character for an entire book. He references his Blessing several times. He mentions having alien memories in his head never. I concede that lack of proof is not proof of lack, and Blessings have been known to work in subtly different ways from individual spikes (EDIT: Unable to find anything canon about hemalurgic tin spikes, so previous statement is suspect; for all we know, tin spikes really do enhance all five senses). Still, it strikes me as at least as valid an argument against copper holding memories as "because the Mag says so" for an actual reason to trust. A reason to speculate? A reason to wonder? A reason to concede possible? Certainly, all those and more. An actual reason to trust? A stretch. Back to the actual quote, I find it odd. The question itself doesn't talk about removing memories, it talks about altering them. As has been pointed out, we are only able to speculate on what specifically Vasher had the girl do. While a recent WoB has Mr. Sanderson himself telling us not to trust WoB on really obscure stuff, and I think this qualifies, I hasten to suggest that even if copper can steal memories, that something with a bit more subtlety than a simple removal of specific engrams must've happened in this case.

Why?

I'm not quite as confident as you that the visions indicate Dalinar has been "interacting" with his Spren for a while, but remember he also Invests after saying two Oaths in quick succession. His case is clearly atypical. As for Rock noticing, recall that Rock didn't seem to notice Glys. I get that Rocks spends much more time with Lopen than Renarin, but he still spends enough time with Renarin that it's suspicious he never noticed Glys. We saw that Ym's spren was very, very secretive, that even Ym could rarely talk directly to her, so presumably Glys was just that secretive. It's possible Lopen's spren is the same way. I happen to agree with you that Lopen is a Squire, but I'm not totally sure and I wouldn't tell anyone disagreeing with me that their position is implausible.