Phantom Monstrosity

Actually, there's a chance Brandon will put up the big conflux book on his website. Stormlight itself isn't going to have a lot of crossing over as the focus - that said, he's hinted the epilogue to stormlight two will have an inter-magic-system fight, and

Preservation isn't sane enough to chat, and can only read minds, not talk into them.

Provided you train them as goldsmiths, and don't ever move that gold more than a few feet from the stamp for a prolonged period, yes. You can already turn a terrible pot into a beautiful highly-decorated one. I would argue that the type of mass-production is already happening. I mean, the difference between 'a door right here with gold inlay' and 'enough gold for an inlay' isn't really that big economically speaking. It's apparently cheaper to make soulstamps than make replicas, but the government has money to burn. Odds are that a trained forger's time is worth a LOT. It's not the same kind of quartz, obviously (due to lacking the iron impurities), but it's still the same darn mineral. So you could irradiate goshenite and turn it into heliodor, and that would work as a gem for your soulcaster. Or you could ruin a helidor by heat-treating it, and turning it a different color. Heck, emeralds don't all have the same chemical composition.

I'm going to just say 'hey it's just like hemalurgic spikes where you lose charge stormlight more quickly on smaller spikes gemstones, and nothing can hold charge stormlight perfectly except for atium voidbringers.'

Amethyst is purple quartz. Marble, jade, and opal are all amorphous. It's possibly a question of difficulty? I'll point out that clear quartz is actually a gemstone, and we see people making that. Shallan isn't very well informed about gemology, sadly. Yeah, but shai's wood-worm stamp is for wood in literally the same building, so it's going to take fairly well - and if it doesn't, she literally only needs it to be rotten for a few seconds. You need to have a similar degree of skill to do a forgery, so if you mass produce stamps you're really doing is saying 'Rafael, instead of painting this wall, we want you to learn how to make soulstamps, and then make a stamp of you painting this wall'. You still need dudes with training, you still need soulstamp materials, and you get something that's more difficult to upkeep.

It just says '6-evil-mc-donald.jpg'.

Quartz is a subset of Lucentia, yes. The pure form of any essence is easiest to make. Soulcast blood can safely be fed to vampires, which kinda implies it works for mystical interactions... and you just quoted where Brandon said it was the chemical and color signature that mattered, not some cognitive mumbojumbo . And aren't *all* the gemstones they loot synthetic, anyway? Growing in a greatshell certainly ain't natural, that's for sure. And, obviously, it's possible to make steel out of iron in mistborn, and that doesn't have any problems. I'm not sure if they'll go the route of generating synthetic stormlight-class gems before the end of the novel, but Brandon *did* say Having a game-changer built into the system would fit with the whole fabrial renaissance theme. And really, you'd still have issues with accumulating enough stormlight to do anything, and amethyst can only be used to soulcast metal, so it isn't an infinite loop - you're converting diamonds into larger amounts of amethyst. And it isn't like they can't farm gemhearts on an actual farm, either. Also heat treating a gem for better color will probably make it more efficient, if you do it properly. Which is something that they're quite capable of doing, technologically (radiation treatment is... well, it's logistically to do, but it's extremely unlikely they'd stumble across it) Well, forgeries still have to be plausible. So it'd be basically like Shai making her ugly room into the best one in the castle. Presumably the plausibility would be reduced with each thing you brought out - just happening to have an old flashlight in this abandoned warehouse? Plausible. Just happening to have some cans of pineapple? And a hammer, and a map to the nearest police station? Each of those is plausible, but having all at once is implausibly convenient. And of course you have to spend all the work on each soulstamp, so it isn't like you're getting things for free.

Kelsier didn't have preservation's power at that point, since preservation was still around. (That, and we have WoB that "Spook was the only one in the crew he could speak to.")

You're assuming that the stamps will last forever; the reason that they wear off so quickly on humans is because people are constantly changing. If you remove something fundamental to your forgery, odds are it'll start getting rejected. Let's say shai stamps a box so that it's full of gold. <<there's currently a gold bar in this box>> Shai takes it out. It now no longer has any gold. <<FORGERY NOW CRITICALLY IMPLAUSIBLE PREPARE TO DELETE GOLD.BAR>> And then the stamp pops off, possibly taking a couple minutes to do so. Even if that doesn't happen in the next few minutes, there's probably a maximum distance requirement, given that this is Sel. So you might be able to forge a box full of gold goblets, put the goblets in your dining room, but not be able to take them out of the room without them turning back into rocks. Quartz is an Essence, dude. We even see a guy getting quartzified on screen. Amethyst is a kind of quartz - and soulcasting has thus far demonstrated considerably flexibility. Aside from that, it's actually trivial to make synthetic amethyst. Any college chemistry student with time on his hands can do it. It's only a matter of time before someone figures out how to soulcast amethyst - either directly, or by leaving trace iron impurities when soulcasting iron into quartz

Are gems really impossible to soulcast? Amythest is a stormlight-holding gem, and you can soulcast quartz. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a breakthrough that happened. Soulcasting is already being used at the industrial-scale, really. The whole economy relies upon it. Forging has enough limits on plausibility that prevent you from making valuable stuff with it - and it isn't like physical separation is going to matter that much. If you managed to turn a box full of gold into a box full of gold-plated lead, I suspect that the bars would remain as lead until the soulstamp on the box dispelled, at which point they'd revert to gold. You probably also have to keep them pretty close to the stamp given how Sel's magics are distributed.

Hey man, soulcasters are a thing.

Also if you're in a 10x slowdown bubble you've got like ten times the amount of light coming in from the surroundings or whatever. But yeah the clues we have are 'It involves where the lost energy from thermodynamic issues goes in certain Allomantic interactions.' and 'Watch for what happens when something leaves a bendalloy bubble'. And, well, things rapidly change the amount of energy they have when they leave the bubble, and you create/destroy a ton of photons. Still, that's a statement that Feruchemy is definitely involved. I guess you could go with the 'reduce mass to zero, all objects with zero mass must travel at c because of physics, also have a guy making a timebubble, which has a really messed up 'position' by virtue of experiencing no time passing, fly until the end of the universe because you have no way to stop, die'

Brandon's mentioned they've got linguistic links to other shardworlds, and RAFOed someone asking 'what's up with them saying cosmere'.

Well, there was that whole floor and bed weakness forgery Shai did.

Ruin has some degree of control as to how he's perceived. He has demonstrated the ability to choose whether or not he's manifested in a visible form, even when he's 'present', as well (which is seperate). But we know he isn't physically 'there' even when manifested - unfortunately, it was too dark to tell if it's the same 'blur as you put your hand through a spren', but we know that thrown cans at fake!Reen just go right through. I suspect that (at least some) spren are similar way - they can control how they're perceived within limits (creationspren are a good example), but that isn't really what they are, it's just the image that's associated with them, just how Ruin is 'really' either a giant mob of black smoke or a redhead (depending how you define a 'true form'). Basically, most spren hanging out are always 'manifested directly'.

If time is actually being messed with (and not just your perception of time), then you'd defnitely get shifting.

They don't redshift and blueshift light, which if they paid attention to relativity they should.

Neurologically, no. You still get the same rods and cones being activated, so your brain doesn't notice the difference. And like I said, time bubbles already just ignore relativistic effects. Feruchemy is also really useful for getting the required secondary handwaves to make things work - in that respect it's the best magic system in the series, as far as I can tell, and it's already established that feruchemical mass isn't *quite* the same thing as real mass, in terms of how it interacts. Any FTL drive is going to involve vigorous handwaving at some point, and saying 'we reduce the pseudo-mass of the ship to the point where the speed of light for it is higher' is like one line.

I don't think it's permanent, since the last time we saw an Elantrian he wasn't glowy at all.

Actually, he originally wasn't planning for Kelsier to be around.

It's a FAKE. Like a made up friend, the way wizards are. Made up make believe FAKEY FAKEY FAKES.

Nah, I'm saying that you can go however fast you want,and any questions about 'how fast are you going' will be answered with 'as fast as I want dude'. The fact that space gets totally distorted would be a side effect. It's like how time bubbles make sure that redshifts and blueshifts don't happen. I mean if you want to get all realmatic, you can argue that the existence of a spiritual and cognitive realm inherently allows for an aether to exist, which makes some of the fundamental underpinnings of SR and GR to poof away. I mean, under your theory (if I understand correctly) gravity is fully spiritual.

Feruchemical mass-changing inherently weirdifies space, though. Or at least, it weirdifies mass, and mass distorts space.