Oudeis

Can you Awaken a dead body without Awakening it as a Lifeless?

Would anything realmatically-interesting happen if Shallan painted a Memory using paint made from the Tears of Edgli? WoR:

I'm sure it's been confirmed somewhere that you cannot burn both copper and bronze at the same time. Also, as far as B is concerned, I believe I've read WoB that if a Seeker is inside a coppercloud, he cannot sense anything. D sensing A is the interesting one.

Words of Radiance.

I gonna dispute this, largely because its one of the things I like most about the Cosmere. Intent is huge and important, but it is nothing like 'almost everything'. The world's best Lurcher could Intend to pull metal to his chest with every well-trained fiber of his being; without iron, or indeed his innate sDNA, it would do nothing. Its not like Harry Potter which is your basic "wish for a thing and it happens", if you don't phrase your Command in the very specific and seemingly arbitrary way that will work, it won't work. Vivenna even explains that _how_ you 'want' it is important. When she tried to untie the ropes, her Intent was pure, but she was "wishing too hard", basically. She had to step back in her own brain and let her mind do it subconsiously, like how she changed her hair. Perhaps I read too much into how you phrased this. I get that realmatics are important, but what I love about the Arcana of the cosmere is, so are all of the concrete, specific details. Get one wrong, and all the 'intent' in the world will mean nothing.

You must Awaken in your native tongue. Has the language of Halladren changed so little in three centuries that no one thinks Vasher talks funny when he Awakens? Also interesting to note, Commands seem to work based on what you call a person, not their real name. Vivenna has no trouble Awakening a cloak to "Attack and grab Denth" despite that not being his original name. I wonder how much other leeway you have? Could it work on "that guy"?

I'm afraid I have no constructive criticism, since I basically loved it. I will re-read soon and try to nitpick out a detail or two in an attempt to be of some help, but basically please keep posting chapters of this.

Thank you. The ambiguity of "when does this happen" was deliberate. Thank you for pointing out the anachronisms; I'm going to smooth it out and try to remove those. I want it to be unclear to the reader when this happens. The point is that setting would be a distraction. If you are mentioning that fact that Sazed says they might see more "Survivor of [blank]," than yes, that was very deliberately what I was trying to allude to. Going forward might be difficult, based on my own personal mythos, which is that the Survivor first overcomes something, and then later returns and defeats it. Kelsier first simply made it out of Hathsin alive. Later, he came back and actually destroyed what made the place worthwhile (only for a few centuries, aka until the end of the world). Spook first simply flees a burning building. Later on, the city is aflame, and he is the one who puts out the fire. By this logic, I would have to have her find the spike of her own tin and... stick it in her own eye? I dunno. Also, it would be a foregone conclusion, considering the precedent, so it sorta bores me to write it. I will prolly not write it, but it's a possibility. My ending was very specific, and very deliberate. I wanted the ending to mirror, and then I wanted to take it one step past that. This is a piece about hemalurgy, so it's not going to wrap up nice and neat. The writing style is meant to be an analogy for the pain of a hemalurgic wound. I want the reader to feel that tension. I want to bring them to the logical conclusion, and then I want to push them out of that comfort zone. I want them to feel that there's something difficult to explain that just isn't right. And yeah, it's partially in case this turns into a prologue for an actual story. I want to revamp it a bit to add a few external touches. How it feels is important, but what is also important is that this was a violent crime committed against her, and as you mentioned, I make it way too internal. I want the internal bits to emphasize how horrible this thing is, but I'm not connecting that enough with the externals to make it clear that this was something done to her. Thank you for your feedback! It is invaluable.

I'm reasonably sure that isn't how actual dissociative identity disorder works... Can you Command multiple things at once? For example, could you hold two straw-men and two colored handkerchiefs, and Command them both at once to "Dance About"? I'm guessing not since Vasher awakens the straw men one-by-one when he's looking for that tunnel with Vivenna (I think, if I'm remembering the scene correctly... I've just begun a re-read so I will see it again soon enough). What about withdrawing Breath? If I have 10 ropes, and I've simply stored 5 Breaths in each, and I wrap all ten around my arm and say, "Your Breath to mine," will I suck up all 50 Breaths at once? Or would I have to do it 10 times? Sidenote: I may have asked this before on this forum, but I don't think so. If I store my Breath in a shawl, then get more Breath, can I simply add them to what I've got stored? Or would I need to withdraw the Breath, mix them together in my own body, and deposit the new, larger amount? Can two different people store Breath in the same shawl? (Remember, two different feruchemists can store the same attribute in the same metalmind). Can two different people give the same piece of rope two different Commands? What if they both give the same Command? If a Command takes 50 Breaths, and two people, each with 25 Breaths, hold the item and say the Command at once, will it draw the combined 50 Breaths from both of them and function?

No one understands what I’ve lost. The worst to me are the ones who think they do. I see them judge me. I hear them whisper that I’m arrogant, that I lament losing something that made me better than them, that I’m complaining because now I’m just a normal person, now I’m not special. This cannot be what normal feels like. I don’t care about the allomancy. I loved it, and it was a part of me, and I would never have given it up for the world… but I never thought it made me better than anyone. It was like being left-handed, or good with numbers. Just one part of me. Still, even without it, I could find a way to go on. It’s not even my eye. The pain is always there, but without my tin, even that feels dull most of the time. Even the flat world my one good eye gives me isn’t that bad. If that were my only problem… well, yeah, I’d still be very sad. But no one seems to understand. People see these things, and they add them up, and they think they know what it’s like to be me. I’m angry all the time. But… it doesn’t feel like how I remember anger. It feels… hollow. It’s the shape of anger, but it doesn’t have the fire. I remember being angry, beforehand, and it felt passionate and strong. Now it feels like my mind is trying to act angry but can’t remember how. I don’t understand what happened. It was over in a moment. I didn’t see whoever did this to me, I just heard some sound behind me, turned around, and suddenly I was in a world of pain. My eye hurt a lot but it wasn’t just there, all over my body like a rash on the inside of my skin. Eventually passing out was a blessing. When I woke up, one of my first thoughts was that I had lost my tin. I don’t know how I knew, I’d never felt it inside of me before when I didn’t have a reserve, and I certainly can’t recall what it felt like before I ever Snapped, but among the other things wrong with me, I could just feel this part of me missing, and I somehow knew it was tin. I think I realized that before I realized I was only seeing out of one eye. I don’t talk to my friends anymore. They irritate me now. I mean my real friends, the ones who’ve stuck by me. Maybe they’re the worst. Every last one of them is convinced she just needs to drag me out to a party, take me for a walk in the sunshine, show me that life goes on, that it’s not as bad as I think. I don’t need tin to hear what they’re really saying. This is your fault. Just get over it. Just want to be normal again, and you will be. Fun is like anger to me, now. Even when I’m genuinely enjoying something, it’s just the shape of happiness. It’s only skin deep; it can’t reach my heart. No one understands what I’ve lost. No one understands what was taken from me.

Good question, Argent. Is it theoretically possible to Awaken in your sleep? Could someone with a lot of Breath have a nightmare and wake up to find that their linens are restraining them and their pillow is grey?

Arcanum is totally a thing. I AM MAKING FETCH HAPPEN. Our theory has schismed on the nature of "admin privileges." I think your theory that the Heightenings prove that the Breaths constantly require admin privileges to be updated... well, it certainly looks plausible. I think it's one potential valid option. I just think my theory is equally valid, with the paucity of hard data on the subject. I suggest that for now we each agree to let the other believe as he wishes, until such time as we have more evidence to back up our theory. Additional potential creepiness of such an Awakener/Trueself... stealing the Divine Breath from a Returned. Not only do you get one, huge powerful Breath, you just killed a God.

Are there any "direct from Mr. Sanderson" snippets in this book, the way there was in the core MAG book? Is anything interesting/canonical mentioned in those, like his tantalizing tidbit about feruchemical aluminum?

Is the edge of a BioChromatic aura sharply defined, or fuzzy?

Sorry, I hadn't addressed the underlying theory. Also, I'm sure someone is about to follow me up by providing you a link to the larger discussion; I'll just hand you the tl;dr version now. First, your theory is very valid. The truth is, we have absolutely no idea how it works. We have literally only two scraps of information, a quote from Brandon in the MAG, and a question Kurk asked him once, and the literal only scrap of hard information we get out of either of them is, "yes, it's possible." So perhaps your idea is right, and you have to mess around with your own identity in a very specific way until you can use that person's Breath. But there is an alternate theory. The idea is, Breath doesn't say, "Only Andy can use me." The theory goes, "No one who isn't Andy can use me." In this model, Tim doesn't have to make his Identity look exactly like Andy, he just has to lower his own Identity until he's essentially no-one. (Obviously this can open a whole host of other issues). A lot of us go with this version of the theory for now, and I'm admittedly basing my speculation on this theory. Also, a few people take Mr. Sanderson's answer to Kurk's question as strong evidence to support the theory; personally, I don't see it as anything more than confirmation of the original quote, but you can read it yourself and decide what you think it says. At the end of the day, however, the one concrete WoB we have (as I cited in the original post) is that doing it with metalminds is definitely possible. I propose that it's not too big a leap to consider it might possibly also be done with Breath. Interesting theory... since Commands require a firm, and specific Intention, I assume that as long a Tim meant his own arms, they would mimic his own arms, regardless of who owned the Breath. If they can only mimic the arms of the person they "belong" to, I imagine the Command would simply fail, as it didn't match its Intent. You raise interesting points, however. Breath Spanreeds might be a thing. Could you Awaken two brushes with some Command like, "Upon call, draw what the other has drawn"? They never really talk about Spanreeds as though there's a distance limit. Would they work on different planets? So now it seems there are two different theories. You think that these "admin rights" are being constantly asserted, that the instant Tim restores his own Identity, the Breath either has to accept that, or be ejected from his body. An alternate theory is the idea like a beehive. The entrance to the beehive is guarded strongly. You cannot get in if you don't have business there. But the entrance is the only place that it's checked. Wasps have learned to sneak in through the back somewhere, and the bees inside just let him wander around. By this theory, the Breath will sit quietly in your system, not caring that you don't match its Identity. It's like being smuggled into the country. You should have gotten your passport stamped, but you didn't, and the police aren't going to swarm you the instant you step out of hiding. By this theory, Tim will prolly have to repeat his trick any time he wants to Awaken something or get the Breath back from that (in the example, the smuggler have to put their disguises back on if they go to the cops or leave the country again) but he won't have to keep it up constantly. I truthfully do not know which is more likely to be correct. I feel like the second is more narratively interesting, since it means stealing someone's Breath gives that person the chance to take it back from you, but I can't think of a Realmatic reason one might be more "likely" than the other. Can we think of a different Arcanum that operates under similar principles?

But, by the theory we jointly share of lock and key (basically, the Breath says, are you Andy? and Tim says, well I'm not not Andy, and the Breath says, okay!) there's something funky going on with Tim's Identity at the time. Who then gets admin rights on the Breath? If Tim tried to stamp his admin rights, wouldn't the Breath be like... wait, you're not Andy! Does Tim take the Breath, then re-assert his own natural Identity, and at this point it overwrites Andy's "stamp", only because it now can't go back?

Additional thought: What if this aluminum hack doesn't change the "ownership" of the Breath? If Awakener Andy Awakens a rope to Hold when Thrown, and Throws it at Trueself Tim, and then Tim does his trick to steal the Breath... what if it still thinks of itself as Andy's Breath? Tim could awaken a shirt to "be as my arms and give me strength", but if Andy grabs the sleeve, maybe he could say "Your Breath to mine" and take the Breath back, because the moment of one person willingly giving their Breath to another person never happened, meaning Andy is still the "owner" of the Breath?

Believe it or not, the spoilers come from a WoB posted in the MAG. I know the usual rule about the canonicity of the MAG, but this comes directly from one of the few quotes Mr. Sanderson has in the book. My question is this. Could a Trueself (an Aluminum Ferring) steal Breath? Per the MAG: ((Upvotes to anyone who can provide additional quotes on the subject)) On Nalthis, you cannot take Breaths from people, you can only retrieve them from Type III Awakened Objects. If you give it to another person, that Breath is now theirs. If you use it to Awaken a Lifeless, a Type II Awakened Object, you cannot get the Breath back. Here is Vasher's explanation, from chapter 46: Yet only a few paragraphs later, he admits: I typically refrain from contradicting an in-world expert, and in my personal estimation, Vasher is in the Top Three experts in his personal Arcanum, alongside Shai and Silence. However, his own admission that there's a lot he doesn't understand leads me to humbly suggest that there might be a more elegant, simpler solution. We've got a few Words of Brandon on the subject. source I know I've also read WoB that Lifeless are a lot less mindless than people suspect, I know it's lightly reference in the annotation to chapter 57. EDIT: There's also this quote, provided by Kurkistan, that provides WoB support that Lifeless are more aware than people realize, from the annotations to chapter 47. Not hard-and-fast, I admit. Still, taken together, I have a theory that I think has some merit. The reason you cannot take a Breath back from a Lifeless is the same reason you cannot take it back from your neighbor; a Lifeless has enough Identity that the Breath becomes his. Mr. Sanderson even says, a Lifeless could give up its own Breath (if it were sentient enough). This leads to feruchemy. An aluminum ferring can adapt their own identity in some way to hack access to the metalminds belonging to someone else. What if this same trick lets them do the same with Breath? Let's say an Awakener Awakens a rope to Grab Things, and it ties up a Trueself. Maybe the Trueself could do a trick with his own Identity, say "Your Breath to mine," and the rope would fall to the ground, while the Trueself would now have the Breath. A further, and disturbing theory; what if he could do this with people? Walk through a crowd, taking the Breath from every shoulder he bumps against? Or what if he could remove the single Breath from Lifeless? Of course, this is all flagrant speculation. As Vasher himself says, there could be something unique in a (quasi)-living human body that truly does "stick" stronger to Breath (this would explain why objects try to take on human form when they are Awakened). I still like the idea of a Returned, with a hemalurgic spike for feruchemical aluminum, roaming the world, stealing the Breath a week he needs to survive. EDIT: Formatting EDIT2: Added an additional quote.

Be warned, in my experience FTL questions are RAFO-bait, but if you feel strongly please don't let me discourage you from asking him if you ever get the chance. A WoB in the otherwise-unreliable MAG suggests that Aluminum Ferrings are able to do something tricky and access metalminds belonging to other people. Could a Trueself/Awakener steal Breath from Awakened objects, Lifeless, or even just normal Nalthians?

Hypothetical. Bob, the Awakener, Awakens 50 tiny straw men and Commands them to dance about. Bob dies. Bob Returns as JiggyWithit the Smoove. Could JiggyWithit retrieve the Breath stored in the straw men?

Not to step on any toes... I think Shawn is absolutely right. And perhaps Kal Dell is already more on-board than we think he (or she) is. Your intro Game Design class prolly isn't going to ask you to make Assassin's Creed on day one. Perhaps a simple side-scroller with very simple objectives will be your final project. If you want it to look Warbreaker inspired, as long as you can make the sprites look right, mazel tov. Shawn keeps mentioning ropes being hard to animate, versus rigid objects... can a rope not be a rigid object, however? I realize this will be more visually boring, but for a demo it might work. If you end up being able to design this as a huge game some day down the line when you've got millions of dollars, hundreds of employees, and four to five years, you can change it and do better. For now, maybe every "empty" rope you find is just the same picture repeated over and over, just a coil of rope identical to every other coil. Remember, human-shaped things take fewer Breaths, and you might start the game as an Awakener who needs to husband your small supply. Maybe once you Awaken a rope, it just become a sprite, the outline of a person, and follows the same "physics" rules as any human body would, and just walks around the screen, jumping and moving left to right, following your Command. Someone before mentioned Awakening being a less active power, and I liked his idea. So, for example, you've got a pool at the moment of 100 Breaths that you can use. You wander around for a bit and "pick up" three coils of rope. On your Awakening menu screen, you're shown the Objects you have, the Commands you know, and the Breaths you've got available. Let's say, for the sake of sake, that one of the Commands you currently have mastered that will work on Rope is, "Upon call, walk forward and grab people who aren't me." This is a 25 Breath Command. (Yeah I realize that's prolly low considering actual in-book mechanics, this is a hypothetical). With three ropes, you could Awaken all three with this Command, and your Pool of Breath would now be reduced to 25. You can assign the ropes to the A button, and now when you press it you do whatever "upon call" is considered, and the rope will animate into the form of a small person. It'll walk forward, and attempt to grapple any human it encounters, leaving you free to attack that person. If it gets hit, it falls to the ground in pieces. If it walks forward and hits a wall, it'll just keep walking into the wall until you reach it. Maybe the B button is the default, "Your Breath to mine" button that automatically puts the Object back in your inventory and replenishes your Pool of Breath. Other Commands might be, "Protect Me" on your cloak that simply increases your base defensive stat; maybe more expensive "equipment" could be stuff designed to look more human-like, and therefore require fewer Breaths to give them more complicated Commands. Maybe you learn the Command "Protect me, and upon call, be as my arms and lift that which I must," but it costs 150 Breaths, and you've only got 100. But then at some point you buy/steal/make/forge a new Cloak, one designed to look more human, maybe one woven with some strands of your own hair for Focus, and it can do such a complicated Command for only 75 Breaths, increasing both your defensive stat and offensive one. I realize all of this is far more complicated than the "jump" mechanic for Mario, and makes for a bad demo. Maybe pick something way simpler. A single long rope, and the Command, "Upon call, grab things other than me," and then you can make a room with random objects to pick up. If the Rope is Awakened to that command, you can equip it to the A button, and then whenever you the player hit A, the character whips out the rope, which grabs onto something. Anyway. Like I said. I'm sure you're aware that this is your first Game Design class, and you surely realize that crafting a huge, complicated, immersive game prolly isn't how you'll end your first semester, any more than someone ends Spanish 101 as a fluent interpretor. I agree with Shawn. Use this opportunity to focus on one very simple aspect, and let that become the seed for what one day might grow into a game that makes people really feel like they are Awakeners.

I dunno... Elsa is pretty uber, herself. She built an entire freakin' palace in, what, seven or eight seconds, and wasn't even tired enough to stop dancing while doing it. Olaf is a direct creation of hers; whatever power she's provided him is either likely very strong, or a permanent bond that her own (massive) power is constantly replenishing. It might be a good long while before Nightblood was drawing enough power away from Olaf for anything to happen, or for Elsa to even notice. And yeah, he'd totally be like Vivenna, repulsed and made queasy by Nightblood, at least at first.

I saw someone posted the first verse of this song AS Nightblood. "Do you wanna kill some evil? C'mon, let's go and slay!" But honestly, if any song from that movie has the "feel" of Nightblood to me, it's In Summer. I would LOVE to see Olaf draw Nightblood. I am, however, drawing a blank as to what lyrics to wring for the song. Very minor spoilers for WoR (and big spoilers for Frozen, I guess) EDIT: A bit of clarification

I know... but... I'll try to find the quote, but I seem to recall Marsh thinking to himself that the charge in the spike he left in Penrod was so weak, it might as well not even bother. Yet Vin was able to pierce copperclouds with ease, with her additional spike. Sure, she's a strong Mistborn to begin with, but surely even she is naturally more than one quantum away from piercing copperclouds, and doing so with such ease. Sensing Ruin when no one else can, being the only person to sense the Well.

Why does a spike lose charge when it's left out of a body between theft and bonding to the hemarlurgist, but Vin's spike doesn't seem to lose any charge when left out of her body for literally years after the initial bonding?