Phantom Monstrosity

That's essentially the same as my 'misting amplifier' idea.

Well, not exactly a sliver. Lerasium savatage is the same as ascension, but...

The Lord Ruler didn't have any other spikes piercing his body - it pretty much has to be the bracers.

Well, if anyone can abuse the rules of their aluminum feruchemy, Hoid can.

Not really a complex theory. I think Hoid has the Lord Ruler's atium bracers. Why? Well, they got sold between The Final Empire and Well of Ascension in order to get food money... and just vanish from the plot there. Vin and Elend never bring it up again, even though they're doing their best to try to scrape up some atium from somewhere, and you'd think that one of them would worry that they'd supplied their own enemy at some point when atium was used against them. After all, the only thing people would use atium for is to become a killing machine, so if someone is buying atium, you'd normally expect them to, oh, have a mistborn on staff somewhere, so you'd really be best off paying close attention to that person. If they sold it to Hoid, he could have used any of his wondrous and largely unexplained powers to deflect suspicion, and make them ignore it. Heck, Ruin might've made Vin ignore it as well. Depends if he was the one responsible for scaring her off from Hoid in HoA or not. We have (somewhat inconsistent) Word of Brandon on what happens when someone burns a hemalurgic spike, but it seems to be dangerous in general. Now, some mistborn COULD have chumped out, eaten the bracers, and choked to death on them offscreen, but that would be boring. Hoid always goes for items that are rare, valuable, and mentioned outside their presence in his collection (so far, at least). And, well, atium is condensed solid essence of a shard he hasn't been mentioned as having yet, and, massive historical value aside, these bracers ALSO have hemalurgic and feruchemical charges in them, so it's like a three-for-one deal. Maybe four, if you consider that the Lord Ruler was also a sliver of preservation, and that might've rubbed off on the spikes over the centuries. Not really a substantial theory, but I figure that Hoid *has* to have some atium to complete his collection, getting atium offscreen would be far less interesting, and this would by far be the easiest bit for him to get (second-easiest being Zane's cache). It's cooler than any of the alternatives, and when an author has the option between equally-plausible options, I think the cool one tends to win out.

It's, if anything, easier on Sel. 'yeah there's a world full of white hot-energy. you can see it whenever we cut a hole' Actually building something out of interactions, once you have an idea of how they work. I wouldn't consider anyone who just knew how to count, add and subtract to have a knowledge of 'basic mathematics'. Even if they were using the very advanced and refined Arabic numeral system, instead of an intuitive and obvious tally mark notation. Sure, they've managed to grasp the not-at-all obvious concept that 'fiveness' is a trait shared by five apples and five fingers (which is, surprisingly, the result of education drilling that idea into kids heads - it's just such a USEFUL idea that the cultures that don't have it are extremely rare). I still wouldn't say they understood the basics.

I don't think there's that big a difference. Knowing 'hey there are other realms of existence' isn't a particularly useful fact, given that it has no direct applicability to anything. My minimum bar for a 'basic understanding' here is having some ability to accurately predict what happens when a shard interacts with another shard or a planet. Anything below that fails to even be basic. It's just having some vague idea how to play with the toys that some shard gave you.

Without positing the existence of motion, physics can't exist. It's pretty important. And just to be clear here, there's a distinct difference between understanding 'the metalaws that are beneath magic systems' and 'understanding the magic systems themselves'.

It's more like saying 'motion exists' is fundamental to string theory. Again, Brandon is the one who said it. If you don't like it, take it up with him at the next Q&A.

I'd argue that the existence of the three realms is something so elementary to realmatic theory it doesn't even count as the most basic of basics - even if it's not at all obvious to someone who is uninitiated. What Shai is working with is a so-so approximation that's the equivalent of Aristotelian physics. Naturally, of course, people can parrot facts given to them by a shard without knowing the reasoning behind it. For example, Sazed could say 'a lerasium and atium alloy does such and such, that's totally obvious', but the best non-shard scholars of realmatics would have no idea how he derived that info. You can make an analogy to Awakening if you want - people with more Endowment can just intuit commands out of thin air.

I quoted the 'you need to be a Shard or Splinter to even begin to understand realmatic theory' directly from WoB a couple posts back.

Well, I'll point out that (A) It appears that Jasnath shoves shallan into a white flame to send her back to the physical world and ( There's a STRANGE WHITE SUN in shadesmar. So if, hypothetically, there was a big realspace portal, it'd be the sun.

I've been meaning to ask - what about mythwalker?

I disagree. The fact that things are just obvious to him implies a pre-existing understanding of the concepts involved. Just like it's obvious that a penny is smaller than the sun. It isn't something that you have to figure out by doing calculations and experiments on the size of a penny or the size of the sun.

Sazed attributes extra understanding to having his mind expanded All of this stuff seems obvious to him.

Hardly. It's like saying that a character is 'mooning over' another one, or that they performed a 'homicidal hat trick', or calling it Cadmium, named after the greek king/transformed dragon Cadmus. Using a base 10 system isn't universal, true, but it's also far from uncommon.

Also, if it were 1/16, you wouldn't have an easy way of showing off the atium burners! They only ratio that even vaguely makes sense is 1/256 - which would leave the Mistfallen Brigade conspicuously understrength.

Well, he says 'I have come to see', which doesn't really imply building up the theory from logical deduction. And shards don't seem to have time compression by default, since we have Vin's PoV on that.

Oh, yeah, that's indeed the case. But I'm not convinced that it's 'above this threshold you're automatically a mistborn' - as straff demonstrated, a misting crossed with someone who has too little power to even snap can still produce a mistborn. Both of these quotes are from Blackharp at the same signing - they aren't verbatim.

Sazed figures out the three realms stuff pretty much instantly.

My guess on lerasium alloys is that if you know what you're doing, it has the physical/enhancement thing. If you don't know what you're doing, you become a misting (just like how becoming a mistborn is what happens when you don't know what you're doing with pure lerasium)

Either that, or Ruin didn't know it was something he COULD mess with.

He wanted to sneak up on the origin from behind and surprise it.

Hoid definitely doesn't have a shard.