HSuperLee

Sharders are definitely biased towards the Elsecaller and Truthwatcher orders. Its not necessarily that Sanderson's books are only read by certain kinds of people so much as only certain kinds of people have the personality type that leads them to joining an online forum to discuss magic, continuity, and theories.

According to the test I align most with the Truthwatchers, which I do not disagree with. But if I had my choice, I would choose to become a Skybreaker (thus my profile picture.) I don't have anything against the Truthwatchers, in fact, I quite like them. But even without knowing the Truthwatcher oaths, I'm probably already following them in my life. Being a Skybreaker would actually help me grow as a person as overcome some of my weaknesses. Being a Truthwatcher would, I suspect, just be me being me, and I would like to become more than I am. Not sure what it says about me that I'd rather bond a spren who is going to challenge me and help me grow as a person rather than one I'd get along with fairly well, but that's my opinion on the matter. Short answer: most likely Truthwatcher, but hoping for Skybreaker, so I answered Truthwatcher on the poll.

I believe that its meant to be a feminized version of Loki/Logi. If you use the Logi name, you can see how that goes Logi -> Logna. Plus Loki has some association with fire, just like Logna, might have been associated with protection of the home, like Logna teaching humans how to bind the landwights, and Loki was considered the sibling of Odin (adopted) just like how Logna is Woden's sibling.

One thing to remember is that we know that not every Inquisitor is the same, but most people did not know that. If they saw an Inquisitor with enhanced pewter do things that no other pewter-arm could do, then people are going to assume Inquisitor's break the normal limits of allomancy. If an Inquisitor had f-gold and people see them heal from what should be a lethal wound, they're going to assume all Inquisitors have impossible healing. Combine this with the fact that the Skaa didn't even know what allomancy was, and it becomes pretty clear how the Inquisitors developed their reputation.

It may be a derivative of Surtr, which, as far as I know, literally means "black." It would explain his connection to the Ragnarok myth that appears in Frugal Wizard.

Perhaps the best way to create lerasium would be to do so for completely scientific purposes. If you wanted to study lerasium you might be able to put yourself in the right mindset. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not inherently about change. So if one of us got dropped into the cosmere and wanted to study the feruchemical effects of lerasium, we might be able to create it. Now, I do have some fear that if Kel manages to reach a state where he could benefit from lerasium, he would find it relatively easy to create as it wouldn't be a change for him, but rather he would see lerasium as making him more himself, which is to say a mistborn.

A fantastic find, Alder. The thing you've said that I'm especially honing in on is this bit: We've had lots of theories that claimed Wax was more in line with Preservation during his experiment, but I've never been satisfied with the reasoning behind those theories. Preservation isn't the opposite of destruction, its just stasis. The idea that Wax succeeded because he didn't actively want to change things makes a ton of sense to me. Change is of Ruin, so it creates extra atium. Actually, do we know if Wax's experiment created any net gain in atium, or did it merely produce a net gain in lerasium? (I say net gain to differentiate materials that survive the explosion from those that are consumed in the process). Either way, I think you might be on to something.

I feel the need to point out that even if f-steel doesn't improve perception speed, and even if it doesn't improve reflex speed (which I would think it has to just so you don't trip over your own super fast legs) it is still going to improve interception speed. Even the very limited human brain has time to register an attack faster their our bodies can keep up. At least that's been my experience. The difference with steel is that as soon as you know you need to move, you can. I personally believe f-steel is more powerful than that, but at the bare minimum, assuming the least benefit from f-steel possible, its still nuts in the advantage it gives to close quarters fighting. Will it let you dodge a bullet? Almost certainly not. However fast movies and tv have made you think a bullet is, you're underestimating it. But for anything not moving a mile per second, steel is going to work pretty well against it. All that said, I'm now thinking how interesting it would be to have a power where you can move super fast, and maybe you can even react to things super quickly, but because you wouldn't be able to perceive your own motion, you'd have to move in bursts where you plan out your movements very carefully before doing them. From your perspective it would be a little like teleportation, just with the added effect of doing stuff during the transition. That would have been a cool way to portray f-steel. But I don't think that's actually how it will work, so this particular tangent is mostly irrelevant.

Never even heard of it. I'm religious, so my opinion on the end of the universe has a much more eternal spin on things, but that's not exactly something to discuss on this forum. I assume the Big Bounce is based on the idea of the Big Crunch leading to a revitalization of the universe. But that's just a guess based on the name.

I'm reminded of a Robert Frost poem: Personally, I'd rather the Cosmere end in fire than ice, possibly even in the process of being reforged into something new. I just don't like the Cosmere eventually being empty and devoid of life as the universe slowly winds down. However, I'm not too fond of the idea of it becoming like WoT where the universe is in a long-term steady state and cycles just repeat themselves. So, basically, I hope the Cosmere experiences a radical transformation into something new when it finally comes to the end.

Well that negates just about everything I said.

Okay, this is a much more difficult question to answer. We don't actually know the full capabilities of living Plate yet. For example, if an assassin was able to sneak into a Radiant's room to try and kill them in their sleep, would the Plate automatically for as the assassin brings down their blade, despite the Radiant not being aware of it? We don't know. I will admit that trying to sneak attack a Radiant is a lot more difficult when they have a spren that can keep watch while they sleep, and is probably not going to be easily discovered by a would-be assassin. Fortunately, we can ignore the unknowns of living Plate for one order, the bondsmiths. Now, I know, bondsmiths are extremely powerful, and might even have virtually unlimited light to draw upon, assuming they keep infusing themselves or gemstones they're carrying. But if you can catch one unaware, or have a way to bypass healing, they lack the defensive boost of Shardplate, which is the biggest hurdle in my mind to killing a Radiant. With that in mind, all we need is a way to overcome the healing effect of Lights. While I admit this would be another unknown, I see great potential in the use of hemalurgic aluminum. We don't know what exactly aluminum spikes do or how they work, but the little information we do have says that they "remove all powers." The way I see it, the spike likely needs to be charged before it has this effect, and we have no idea if you can charge a hemalurgic spike off a normal person, if you need a special kind of metalborn, or whatever else it might take. But once you have this charged aluminum spike, reforge it into a bullet(s) (I don't know if this would be possible in reality, but Sanderson seems to have decided aluminum bullets are a thing in the Cosmere), and now you have a shot that can negate magical abilities. I will acknowledge that this is where the spren bond complicates things. It might be that a spren can restore the Radiant's abilities fairly quickly by simply reestablishing their with the Radiant, but at the very least I'd imagine this would require the Radiant reswear their oaths and probably remove the aluminum spike first. While Plate would almost certain block aluminum bullets (lighter bullet = less momentum), Bondsmiths do not have such an advantage. Though they might be able to use Tension to turn their clothes into armor, but until we see Tension actually used, I'm going to ignore that possibility. Theoretically, a single h-aluminum bullet can kill a Bondsmith. In practice? Who knows. There's a reason I generally avoid the versus threads, fights rarely work out the same way in reality as they do on paper.

I think the point being made is that most of us have so little desire to fight a fourth oath Radiant that our minds immediate go to the "toss a warhead then pick a Shard and start praying" option. Frankly, I wouldn't feel safe going up against a Radiant even if I was in a tank, so I'd want more than that if I had to fight one.

Can I swap out the powers for modern artillery and 20 miles of distance?

You definitely have some interesting ideas, but I do worry (perhaps that's too strong of a word, but that's the one I'm using) at the foundation you seem to be assuming. It appears you area applying a heuristic to Sanderson, assuming that because he is a white American he must therefore be modeling his writing off of his perception of America's historical development. On one hand, I think you're not giving him enough credit. The man puts an insane amount of time and effort into his work, especially in regards to research, and has a desire to understand other cultures, though that admittedly shows up more in his Stormlight Archive series, even having spent part of his life living in South Korea. On the other hand, how would you differentiate him developing culture based on the logical conclusions of possible developments from the initial setup of the world he has created from following the patterns given to us by history? By that I mean this, you may similarities between Scadrial's development and western nations on Earth, but how can you tell what he's copying and what he's concluding is a logical progression? As Alder pointed out, you can say that the lack of slaves in Era 2 is an attempt by Sanderson to whitewash American history, or you can see that those in the Basin grew from a culture of tyrannical slavery, and didn't want to return to such a society. Yes, there will certainly be parallels between Scadrial's history and Earth's, but that is because our own history is the only example we have by which to imagine another world's. As for Sazed having power and morality within an inverse relationship, Sanderson has said that one of the themes of the Cosmere is what happens when humans become gods, and an alternate interpretation for the events are not that Sanderson is affirming the idea that God (capitals do matter when using two words that are spelled the same) cannot be both all-powerful and all-good, but that he is exploring how a human would carry their flaws into their apotheosis, and thus a human, not being all-good, would not be able to perfectly wield the powers of a god, even a less than all-powerful one.

I think that what we've seen of tin savantism has biased us towards the idea of losing a sense. I also think we need to acknowledge that we really don't fully understand what allomancy is or what it does. Take a-iron and a-steel, we say that they let you see the presence of and remotely affect metals, but that's not quite it. Kel describes what we've named "steelsight" as the sight of gods, and Wax believed while using the Bands of Mourning that he could use steelsight to see people's souls. Iron and steel may perhaps be better described as having the allomantic effect of allowing the physical portion of your soul to Connect with and influence the physical parts of other souls, the most obvious and common application being through metal, as metal seems to be the physical manifestation of certain spiritual ideals. But now I risk straying into wider Cosmere territory. My point is this, iron and steel savantism may not have much to do with steelsight or your ability to push and pull metals, but may have a deeper effect on the very soul of the savant.

Immortality is underrated. That said, I rather like being human. As cool as Kandra are, I'm not sure I'd be willing to give up being human for their abilities. I tend towards full feruchemist. I just enjoy their power set more. A-tin and A-steel make mistborn tempting, but feruchemy has so many utility effects that I'd be using all the time that its hard to pass on.

A question that occurs to me is this, can a Radiant (not in Shardplate) actually breathe in stormlight in space? Isn't the biological mechanism that allows us to inhale dependent on air pressure, and thus a Radiant in a vacuum would find themself incapable of refreshing their stormlight, kind of like how Lopen found he couldn't take in more storemlight while underwater? I get that there's a question in the case of a submerged Radiant, where they might be able to force themself to inhale water and trust the stormlight will fix it, but is it even possible to force yourself to inhale in a vacuum? I will acknowledge, on the other side of things, that this wouldn't be an issue for a Windrunner. They can use adhesion and gravitation to create a bubble of atmosphere around them and take it to space, maintaining pressure even without Shardplate. In a different vein, Bondsmiths appear to act as sources of Light, so they'd probably be fine as well.

Didn't they say that the Heavenly Ones attempted to go to space and that the damage the vacuum did to them outpaced their healing? The quote I'm finding is in RoW chapter 87, and I'm seeing, Its specifically the "died within hours" that makes me think this isn't as easy as I've seen people imply on this forum. I know people think radiation damage would be easy to heal, but this quote makes it seem like the Fused were prepared for pressure and asphyxiation, and yet something unexpected killed them, which I suspect may have been the radiation. Now, I do believe that Shardplate would mitigate or eliminate many of the issues, assuming an abundance of Stormlight, so a Windrunner would probably do better than the Fused did.

Getting away from SA spoilers, alder is correct, you'd need a way to "tune" the directionless Preservation within the spike so that it provides a human attribute and can act as a blessing. I personally think this may be able to be done kind of like making a magnet, where you align the atoms in a nonmagnetic material like iron by rubbing a magnet against it. Though even with magnets, this is temporary, and it requires some kind of change in the substance to make it permanent. If I had to guess, I'd say you might be able to make a blessing by taking a blank spike and having a feruchemist with blanked Identity store a massive amount of the attribute you want in the spike for a short time. This wouldn't be a perfect solution due to metallic properties. It might work with a tin or zinc spike to make blessings of awareness or stability, it might even work with a copper spike to make blessings of presence, but I doubt it would work with an iron spike to make a blessing of potency, as f-iron stores weight whereas h-iron steals strength. I'm sure there's another way to charge a blank spike, but I have no idea what it would be.

Speaking of feruchemists as monks, I'm still waiting for the day we see a full feruchemist tap strength while storing weight and reach a point where their own body weight is basically negligible to them, allowing them to climb brick walls with just the strength of their fingertips and leap over houses. F-iron is almost cheating in how good it is for both storing and tapping.

I'm about to be extremely pedantic, I apologize upfront for that. Part of how I understand this is that f-gold doesn't storing healing, it stores health. Its about the overall quality of the body, not solely the body's ability to recover from injury. So when Wayne draws 10 days worth of healing from his goldminds over 10 seconds, he's not healing at 86,400 times the speed, he's increasing the current quality of his health by 86,400 times for those 10 seconds. Yes, that has the side-effect of making him heal faster, but that's not strictly speaking what the metal does. In short, it doesn't make him heal faster, it makes him more healthy, and those are two slightly different things. If you want to think about it this way, f-gold doesn't just store healing speed but also healing quality and efficiency, and thus tapping it has a much more dramatic effect than if it was just healing speed. I will add the caveat that I think this is something Sanderson has changed since he came up with the idea. In Hero of Ages chapter 73 we have this quote: This doesn't seem consistent with how we've seen healing work in Era 2, which seems to indicate to me that Sanderson has reconsidered the mechanics and their effects. All that said, the loss from tapping large amounts still likely does apply to gold. So rather than 10 days worth of gold being used in 10 seconds being a 86,400-fold modifier, its probably closer to a 80,000-fold modifier, if not lower, but that doesn't make too much of a difference considering how much of a boost even a little extra health would provide a person. I also think we tend to underestimate the power of feruchemy. A person that is twice as strong as a normal person is going to be approaching the upper limits of human strength, and that's just at a two-fold multiplier, which a feruchemist can theoretically maintain for hours with proper preparation. At a 4-fold modifier, just tapping what you stored at twice the rate you stored it, a feruchemist will beat any noninvested person in a competition of that attribute. A brute tapping four-times strength will be stronger than the strongest man, a steelrunner will be faster than the fastest, a sparker smarter than the smartest, etc. We don't really have a metric for measuring overall health in real life, but a person tapping even four-times health would be clearly and dramatically superhuman.

Admittedly I'm making assumptions, but I thought that WoB referred to when a person has had a power or attribute stolen by a spike, rather than just the extra bit of Preservation. I do agree that the Set are likely downplaying the negative side-effects, but I think you might be overplaying them in this case, with the truth being somewhere between.

Now y'all have got me wondering if the excisors that are used to create medallions are some kind of harmonium alloy. I know people have generally theorized that hemalurgy is involved, but it might help explain why making medallions is so complicated and why there are only feruchemy medallions so far. It might just be that the alloys necessary for allomancy medallions haven't been discovered yet.

I like where this theorizing is going. I find myself wondering, however, about the more advanced effects realmatics will have on using hemalurgy to turn people into metalborn. The immediate thought I have is that trying to contain huge amounts of Preservative Investiture within a Ruinous art might have complications. In other words, it might be easier to make ferrings than mistings, and creating mistborn might simply be impossible with only one spike. Even with Harmony being Harmony, the two powers are still repulsive to one another and there may be difficulties in trying to "supercharge" a spike with enough of Preservation's Investiture to create the most powerful metalborn. Yes, there's an argument that if you use purified Investiture (still not something I'm comfortable with existing, but that's an issue for another day) if might not qualify as Preservative enough to cause interference, but I'd argue that allomancy is a result of Connection to Preservation and Hemalurgy can only go so far in forging that Connection. I think your method, @ScadrianTank, would work well for granting feruchemical or "human" traits, but I think beyond that it will be complicated. Granted, and increase of ferrings and potentially even full feruchemists is nothing to scoff at. I think a feruchemist with a good understanding of the spiritual metals is going to be able to pull off a huge number of useful tricks. I just think that getting to what Kel described as "proper metalborn" is going to take a lot more R&D than what we the fans or modern Scadrians have done thus far.