Oudeis

Example: "Is it a boy or a girl?" "Yes, it's definitely one of those two."

Bit of a silly question: Which magic system would have an easier time creating "mechs"; Awakening or Fabrials?

We've only actually seen a few moments of steel feruchemy "on screen" and as I recall nothing Sazed did broke the laws of physics. In fact, while the MAG itself is non-canon, Mr. Sanderson himself does interject a few thoughts here and there, and one of them references steel feruchemy and its limitations. I hasten to suggest that rather than "handwaved", things like this are actually something the author fully considers in the application of feruchemy. Can you cite an example of a time in the actual text or WoB that aspects of feruchemy are hand-waved?

Looks like Meg beat you to it. Thanks, Meg!

That's the thing about fabrial science... in theory, anything is possible. There's no reason there can't be something similar to a spanreed that detects how your own hand moves, and uses up a LOT of stormlight to make the huge mech around you mimic your actions. Or even if not that, then controls and dials in the pilot's seat controlling the fabrials that do move the limbs around. And activate the heat rays.

Oooooh... this makes sense now. If Yalb has been Shallan's squire all this time, that explains why she has enough of a connection to him to draw him that time she does. In the Lait, wasn't it?

Okay. I'm not sure if I'm saying this correctly, I know that I fully intended to pledge $40. Looking over what I can see, I'm worried that I did something wrong at the time and Kickstarter thought I only wanted to donate $20. If it were as simple as just giving you another $20 now I'd do that, but I suspect it will not be quite that easy. Like I said, if either Kickstarter or I goofed and I only gave you guys $20, my friend will just survive borrowing my set of dice instead of having his own.

Exactly. Allomancy isn't "end-positive" because the energy builds more than it destroys, it's end-positive because the power source is external. Feruchemy is capable of some amazing feats, but it does so at the cost of energy within the same system, and what you get back out is what you put in. Hemalugy is capable of some amazing things, but it's end-negative because the process is so inefficient with so much waste. You can take two Seekers and use hemalurgy to combine their powers into one, but it will be a talent less powerful than the sum of the two powers. A Mistborn can be used for hemalurgic theft, but only one power is saved. Five men have to die for one koloss to be born. Even though the power of aluminum is used to destroy something, it's still an externally applied power. Regardless of whether the power is being used for constructive or destructive purposes, it's still power you get "for free", adding power to the system as a whole, and that makes it end-positive.

Just went to check and make sure mine, at least, had gone through properly... it has me listed at $20. I know I backed at the $20 level, but I upped it to $40 to get two sets... is it just showing me my level, or is that actually as much as I backed? Not the end of the world if I only get one set but I was sorta hoping for two...

Hey, official Crafty people. Any word on how the poll will be administered?

Isn't there a WoB that Rashek just made up the word Sliver to call himself the Sliver of Infinity, and that Mr. Sanderson just sorta went with it? I know words like Investiture and Cognitive Realm are all words that mean something very very specific within the context, but I always got the impression that Sliver was just sorta a word, not an actually technically defined term.

I still think in your example you're conflating a blind person with someone in a dark room. It could be said that "sight" requires photons hitting your eyes. A perfectly-sighted feruchemist in a pitch dark room can likely still store, since he's storing the ability to see, not simply the sights that are in front of his eyes. By that metric, even if a feruchemist isn't currently connected to those around him, he's got the capacity to connect, and I believe that's what gets stored. Keep in mind, the feruchemy we see most often is copper, and that clearly works very, very differently from most metals. Perhaps you are storing individual connections, but that would make duralumin like only one other metal, instead of like most of the metals. And, of course, the other metal we see a lot of for feruchemy is iron, which kinda stores mass but kinda stores weight but doesn't quite store either. So what I'm saying is we've got something of a dearth of good practical experience with feruchemy.

While that's true, it hardly seems germane to the current conversation, which is about a Nicroburst using her power offensively to force a compounder to generate too much of a feruchemical attribute. While it's possible a compounder might be in the position of swallowing a metalmind while not wearing enough other metalminds to store all the traits for a few reasons, it remains a reasonably niche circumstance, not exactly one likely to come up enough to warrant concern. Independently, of course, it's a perfectly valid observation.

It's gonna be hard to say for sure, because so very little is known about feruchemical duralumin. It's possible that it's like body heat, where if you're very cold you just have no heat to store. Another possibility is that it's more like sight. Most people can see. If you're in a dark room, I don't think there's evidence that you're unable to store sight. You're storing your capacity to see. When we see Sazed tap a sight tinmind, he doesn't suddenly see what he was looking at when he stored, his vision now improves, implying that he stores his capacity to see, not his current vision. By that metric, even if someone doesn't make a lot of friends, even if his skill in making friends is limited, he's still got just as much capacity to have a friend as anyone else, and could therefore store just as much connection in duralumin as anyone. After all, it's about awareness, yes? If Ashton Kutcher dropped a vase, or an autistic guy dropped a vase, the sound would cause just as many people to glance over and see what happened. Their reactions thereafter would be very different, but there's nothing inherent about gregarious people that makes them inherently more "noticeable" to any huge degree. It's possible someone very very outgoing could store connection faster than someone who tends to get ignored at parties, but to follow the tin/sight analogy, neither of them are "blind," and I'd expect the difference between them to be minimal. There's also a recent WoB I know someone posted recently and I'm having the devil's own time finding about feruchemical duralumin storing a connection to the planet, so that's presumably something everyone has at least some of, even if they don't have friends. And, of course, we can't know anything definitive, anyway. We simply haven't seen enough of feruchemical duralumin in text or WoB to do more than speculate. But I'm always pleased to find a fellow speculator. Welcome to the Shard! Keep the ideas flowing. EDIT: And my buddy hates it when I do this, but I'm upvoting you just for that hilarious name.

I've got the sorta vague impression that "maximum capacity" works out to be not terribly important. Sazed, for example, refers to the pewter back of an earring, not even the earring itself, expressly described in the book as "tiny", as holding a "moderate" charge of strength. Much as a vial of metal, enough to let you burn for hours (depending on the metal) is a tiny vial with a few flakes inside that can be swallowed in a single gulp, I sorta get the impression that mass is rarely a limiting factor in the metallic arts. So while something like a bangle that takes up a quarter of your forearm does, in fact, have a "maximum capacity" I wouldn't be surprised if a compounder could have as many metalminds as he could ever reasonably need (especially when it's of just one metal) without having to go overboard on sheer mass of metal. What I'm saying is, if I'm a compounder and I swallow a ring so I can burn it to get more stores and put them into my metalminds, I don't think I'm ever likely to burn enough at once, even if I'm surprised nicrobursted, than I could fit within the metalminds I've got on me, even if they're all already half-full. Kinxer was right, however, about how much you can store at once. Copper is the easiest. We see Sazed drag out huge tomes full of knowledge, and dump them back into storage, with an impression of ease and speed. It's sorta a precedent that you really can (or at least Sazed can, and while he's the only feruchemist we see, by his own admission and via the context clues we get in the book, he's not actually that good at it, though prolly better at copper than anything else) store as much of a trait as you currently have, not limited at speed by your "feruchemical power". We do know that Compounders burn traits at something like a factor of 10. Is it ever flat-out stated that they can store it that efficiently? We only ever see two compounders, The Lord Ruler and Miles Hundredlives. We do see Rashek compounding, once. He looks old, but not as old as he does when he loses his metalminds. Presumably, then, he's burning youth, using the majority of it, and storing the rest. Is this by choice? Does he wish to sit around merely old instead of antedeluvian? Can he only store so much age at once so that's the oldest he can look at the time? Miles is a poor example; of all the traits, there's perhaps the least downside to having too much health. Leading to the question, is he "filled" with this health for a while, yet? Can he burn his gold, store a fraction of his health, but sit there, flush with health, able to "store" even more than he could on a normal day while napping with a runny nose? Or is the health simply applied? The problem is that unlike things like body heat or metabolic energy, your "health" isn't really a single value represented by a percentage or ratio. Even speed is easier to quantify than health is, so the question is tricky. This should be asked of Mr. Sanderson.

Valid concern. Please keep in mind that I love Sazed, and always have. He tops my list of "Cosmere folk I wish I could hug." This is not a joke; there's a physical, hand-written list sitting on my desk right now. That said, sometimes I hate that guy. He was our best possible hope to know a ton of things about feruchemy and we don't know them because he never bothered to experiment at all, not even for the two whole books with no reason to disguise his power. There's no earthly reason he shouldn't have at least tried tapping and storing electrum, duralumin, even aluminum, and oh my harmony malatium. Imagine if we knew what malatium stored. It was just sitting there. A whole bar of the Eleventh Metal, known to be allomantically active, that Vin never used but a few flakes of to take down Rashek. I'm sure that in the intervening months of Elend's reign they melted it down to get the atium back out of it (that's a thing metallugy can do, yes? You can refine an alloy back into base metals?), but surely there were a few days during which Sazed could have learned what GOD-LIKE POWER it granted...

Don't forget Wyndle's comment about the Ring.

Sorry... head hurts. I did all this math a while ago, and now I can't find it. Your number that one Rosharan year is 1.1 Earth Years sounds right, and that does work the math out to just shy of five millenia, but I feel sure that I had calculated something out to six thousand years once... I'm gonna continue searching (nothing's turned up in my quick search just now) but for now I'm going to assume that you're right and I'm misremembering the math did however long ago. Longer on Roshar. In short, I'm crazy, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I think you're both sorta missing my point... it's not about pointing out flaws that don't exist. It's about... imagine there's one particular person that in high school you had a problem with. And this malatium burner (is there a Misting name for malatium? prolly not) sees a vision of you standing over this guy, he's curled up in the fetal position and you're standing over him holding an iron bar covered in blood. Obviously that never happened, prolly never would have happened, but he was able to find the person in your past who, when you were young and hormones and the judgement center of your brain hadn't fully formed, could have driven you to an act of real violence. Imagine you're not that one person on the planet with no issues, and thinking about this guy still takes you back to that angry place in your head. You never let anyone know how much this douche bothered you, even your best friends think he was just another jerk in your graduating class, but now this misting knows. Emotional allomancy can force feelings on you, but they'll be externally applied. Someone can try to force shame or anger on me, but it won't be my own anger, and my own psyche will work in my favor to help me discount it because there is nothing I'm really associating those emotions with, not a person, a memory, a sight, anything. But malatium? Someone can reach into my past, find the things that bother me, not just point out "hey, here's a time you didn't run a red light. BUT YOU COULD HAVE" but actually find the worst times in my entire past, the actions I was afraid I would take, the man I would've become if she hadn't been there to help me see the light, and this malatium burner, with a few well-chosen words, can bring it all back. In excruciating detail, he can tell me all about the man I'm terrified I might've been if I hadn't been saved. In this scenario, my own mind will be his willing accomplice, bringing up scenarios I've spent years trying not to think about, and it'll be all the worse because I know it's not the crazy ramblings borne of fear, but the actual worst-case scenario of what might have been. Look at Vin. She burned gold once, and was forced to face two possible paths her life could have taken. A sad, pathetic, desperate wretch, a life of fear and pain, hunger and need, barely surviving minute to minute, knowing every time she closed her eyes she might never open them again. And on the other hand... a life without pain. A life of trust, even comfort. A mockery of the life she's led, the crucible she's had to endure. One of the people in the entire first book who hurts her the worst is Shan, because on some level Vin wants that, she wants the dresses and the balls and the beauty, the majesty and the great dance of politics and power between noble houses, and burning gold shoved into her face that her life was the width of a shadow away from everything she could have had, instead. She burns gold for a moment, and it's enough to cause actual physical distress to her body. Maybe that was just the jarring effect of an odd metal, but it's telling that no other metal of any sort, even a few that work on similar principles to gold, have any similar deleterious effect. Of course, there's an obvious rebuttal to everything I've said. Maybe you're totally secure in your life and always have been. Maybe you currently have everything you've ever wanted and never had a moment in your own past where things could have gone horribly wrong. Maybe you were never so scared that something might happen that even knowing now that it never did, the memory of that fear haunts you to this day. In which case, you're a very lucky person, and you're right, malatium holds no fear for you. I still think it's a more invasive metal.

First, I'm concurring with the general sentiment that nicrosil will only burn up metals currently being used; therefore if Eva is burning her steelminds for the allomantic steel, she'd get a burst of steelpushabiitiness, if she's burning them for the feruchemical charge, she'd get a burst of speed. I admit this is just a guess on my part, since I think we've never gotten WoB on the particulars of nicrosil. As for chromium and the earrings... again, basing this on my gut and very little evidence, I'm saying no. We do know that there is a theoretical way to burn metal in your body as a reserve, but there's evidence from the book to suggest it isn't that simple. In either the annotations or epigraphs, I'm sure it's listed that some Inquisitors got allomantic duralumin, and if so they couldn't have used it with steelpushes or they'd've died. Granted, maybe they just used it for emotional allomancy or something and avoided the metals that make up their spikes. We only see aluminum used once, and Vin isn't wearing her earring at the time. We do see her once burn bronze with duralumin, detecting Breeze influencing Elend, while wearing her earring. It does use up her bronze reserve, but her earring is intact, so duralumin does not default to burning up whatever "reserve" the earring could be used for. This to me says that the earrings are prolly safe from chromium. That said, there's a lot of reason to call the evidence into question. Chromium, if anything, is more like aluminum than duralumin, and the two metals act very differently. Duralumin only works on metals being burned, aluminum works on them all. Aluminum affects itself, duralumin is immune to its own effect. Even if chromium is similarly modeled to its internal counterpart, which itself is a bit of a stretch, there's no reason to assume it will work like duralumin. And, again, the only people we see using these metals are Vin and Elend. Vin ends up getting pretty good at duralumin, but it's not her primary metal and she has a relatively short time to experiment; a dedicated Leecher or Nicroburst might have learned tricks that totally eluded her. Perhaps with practice, the way Vin couldn't at first sense different beats with bronze, a Leecher might be able to seek out things like piercings, even if the allomancer herself doesn't know how to use them as reserves. TL;DR We have very little evidence, only suggestions, but it does suggest that neither nicrosil nor chromium would affect earrings unless the earrings were already being used as a reserve. That said, this is your story, and it sounds like you're in need of a powerful villain. I think it's totally plausible to have a powerful, skilled Leecher who knows how to use his power to vanish even metal just in the body, even if Eva herself doesn't know the trick to access them.

Well... to answer your question, you first have to understand that metal, apart from the God Metals, has no Investiture. They are a gateway to the power of Preservation, and something happens to the metal in the process that makes it go away. We say it gets "burned up" and we know it stops being in the allomancer's system, but besides that we honestly don't know what happens to it. When you burn aluminum, just like with any allomancy, the power of Preservation flows into you. That power does something, restricted by the shape the metal channels it into. In this case, the power is told "find metal within this person's system and make it go away." Doing that does require energy, and it's not destroying the "energy within the metals" because there is no energy within the metals; economically speaking you can talk about the opportunity cost of the power you could have gotten by using up that metal in the process of getting Investiture, but that's not a physical law and nothing concrete is actually "lost", just because access is being denied to it. I can take a butcher knife and cut the power cord to my blender, and my blender will no longer be able to access the power grid, but that doesn't mean I've destroyed the electricity it was going to use. Is the metal annihilated? Is it simply moved elsewhere? Is it converted directly into the spiritual realm? We frankly have no idea. But whatever happens to the metal, the power of Preservation summoned by Aluminum (or Chromium) makes it happen instantly, and the process does take power. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but as long as you realize that the metals themselves aren't actually Invested, it makes sense. Remember, Invested metal is harder to Push on, like filled metalminds, and normal, burnable steel is easy to Push on. It doesn't have any more Investiture than every rock on Scadrial does.

I would be surprised if nicrosil worked on feruchemy that way, if it let you force them to immediately use every charge stored within their metalminds. And if you use it on a compounder currently compounding, he'd prolly just store the excess in his metalminds like he was prolly gonna do anyway. I guess there's a niche for if you can wait until a compounder is about to compound some stores, then rip away their metalminds just as you nicroburst them, but ... I'd be surprised if that came up very often.

I feel like there's so much reason to suspect it can be even scarier than that. You can spend your life resisting temptation literally every time it presents itself, your own actual history might be pristine and pure, but a malatium burner might be able to see all the might-have-beens. They're all things that could actually have happened, so if they see you doing something lecherous, it can't mean you'd never consider such a thing. On the outskirts of possibility, at a ridiculous level of control, it's theoretically possible to keep your own literal past secure and inviolate... but a malatium burner can still see every temptation you resisted, every bad choice you didn't even make, the literal worst possible version of you that could ever have been. I find myself wondering if burning gold has some capacity to spoof malatium the way electrum works for atium... is it possible that if you're burning gold, you at least get to direct where the past-vision goes? Maybe the malatium user can only see the vision that you select, if your own skill is good enough to deliberately select one?

4,500 years on Roshar, the year on Roshar is longer than a year on Earth, and Scadrial is Earth-analogous in many ways, and year-length is specifically mentioned. I will grant you that it's hardly confirmed (that I know of) that Odium has been bound to the Roshar system since Aharietiam, but it's widely and strongly suspected. I can try to find you the relevant quotes, but 4.5K Roshar Years works out to 6K Scadrian Years. If you want your questions answered/discussed, the "Question and Answer" thread is great for that. Typically if people post their questions here, they do so because they only want a response if it's "this question has already been answered." I sorta jumped the gun by responding even as much as I did, because you're right, we don't know for sure that Odium hasn't already splintered Harmony.

MAG =/= canon.