Halyo_Alex

I always took it to mean that there aren't Physical/Enhancement quadrants on the Atium Alloy chart, and things like Iron or Chromium would do mental or temporal things instead.

Are you sure they're both mental and temporal? I don't think Malatium also does mental stuff, if showing a past version of someone is considered "temporal" like normal gold. I could be forgetting something, sure, but cmon, you KNOW it would be fascinating to have Brass Malatium do that and have a misting of that metal, or something.

One of my favorite theoretical alloy effects is using Atium+Brass to Soothe all of your own emotions, like Guilt or Regret, and basically become a sociopath/psychopath who is also heavily dependent on that alloy to avoid having "withdrawal" symptoms (i.e. the resurgence of guilt and regret from doing whatever they do that required them to use Brass+Atium in the first place). Effectively a weird hybrid of a drug addict and a psychopath. Would be a TREMENDOUSLY fascinating character to read about if Brandon ever wrote it out. What I'm more curious about is what other Human Attributes you could steal with god metal alloys in Hemalurgy. More abstract stuff, like compassion or willpower, for example.

Oh storms, Unmade resonances. That just has "nope" written all over it (in the terrifying sense, not the "this is definitely false" sense. This seems terrifyingly possible). Hmm... Makes me wonder about Thaylen Field, with Nergaoul and Yelig-nar, then. Was there a new effect present for them? Maybe Sadeas's men that were overcome with the Thrill? Hmm...

It's not the ettmetal that's touching you, it's the normal spike metal. That metal WILL be touching and piercing the body as normal, the ettmetal will be inside the primer cube on the head of the spike. That part is what you can contain inside non-reactive metal.

To be fair, a lot of colors in gems are made by metallic impurities inside the crystal lattice. So... Maybe you can burn those if it's an Allomantic metal, while having the gemstone be filled with Stormlight.

(Numbers added to the quote for correlation) 1. The ettmetal could be contained inside a shell of regular metal, and would only be present on the head of the spike. So, it exploding's preventable. 2. Whatever mechanism it uses to copy Allomancy burns up the Harmonium to mimic it, so it could likely do the same to replicate the mechanisms of Hemalurgy. With the right Intent behind the person doing the spiking, it could be more successful. 3. Once the spike has done it's thing, you could turn off the primer cube and detach it, and then spike yourself, meaning that it would work normally but with an abnormally large charge. 4. You normally need physical contact with Leeching to remove metals, but Harmonium seems to bypass that requirement and cast the leeching as a bubble. It's not impossible to believe that the same could happen for Hemalurgy.

Screw it. "Be a Sword." That can't possibly go wrong.

Alternatively, we can make a Primer Spike, made of a typical hemalurgic metal, but with a Primer-Cube like device attached to the head of the spike. Turn it on, use something to launch the spike into someone's chest, and bam. Multiple people in the vicinity have pieces of their spiritweb ripped out and crammed into a single hemalurgic spike. Why do I think this? Well, allomantic Chromium, a metal that requires physical contact ordinarily, does not when used as the metal effect of the Primer Cube on the train in BoM. And we know that Harmonium-based technology can also mimic Feruchemy (see: southerner airships), so why would it not be able to mimic Hemalurgy? it contains Ruinous investiture as well, after all. And this would make things MUCH more interesting. For one, if you did this in a super-crowded area, you could get several dozens of times the usual hemalurgic charge for a human attribute like Strength, guaranteed. The Decay rate would probably be immense at this high of a level (assuming that the speed of decay is inversely exponential, meaning it starts fast and slows down as there's less charge), so it would be critical to find some way of preventing decay until you can spike this monstrous thing into someone (like encasing it in Aluminum temporarily). Assuming all of that actually would work, Primer Spikes could be ridiculously terrifying. Somewhat more speculatively, what if an Atium primer spike could take all the metalborn powers in the vicinity and merge them all into itself? you would have most of a Fullborn in a single spike with a crowded enough place. Of course, all of this assumes that a Primer Cube would be able to replicate a hemalurgic charging and do it in an AoE like a Leeching, to multiple people at once...

I've taken to calling them "Shimmerspren" since that's an elegant term for the refracted light that they resemble in the Physical realm. Also, it would make "Glys" a thematically appropriate name, being short for Glisten, like glistening light on a wall, shimmering.

First of all this topic's title is hilarious Second of all this does actually seem kinda possible? it's certainly powerful, but given the nature of Harmonium, i'd say it's sufficiently challenging to get it to even happen.

First of all, thanks for all the feedback! I really needed it. Second of all, I have made a couple of tweaks to the chart since my last post in this topic, so I'll be attaching the new version to this post. As you will soon notice upon looking at it, I've completely reworked the visual style. The big hexagons are the Primes, the small ones are the Compounds, and the medium one is Aether. Another key change is that Dragon has been reverted back to Lightning, which sadly means that Dragons are not among the primal forms of Life that are born naturally in the world. But hey, on the plus side, that means there can be a God of Dragons. And honestly, the main reason Demon is Fire/Chaos is because, well... What else fits that pair of Primes? I could invent some substance, like Wildfire, and have that be the element, but that seems a bit cheap and, honestly, dull. "it's fire, but more chaotic, who would have guessed?", Yknow? Demons, however, do have the relation to both fire and chaos, and I like the odd quirk of Holy not being the perfect counter-compound to Demon. I am also reworking Compatibilities and Counters in the chart. Rather than having dotted lines, it's based more on what "quadrant" of the chart that the Compound falls into. Compounds closer to Order/Chaos are Compatible with each other, and Compounds closer to Chaos/Order are countered by those, if that makes sense. Compounds closer to Earth are Compatible, and Counter elements closer to Air. Pairs of Compounds and Primes directly opposite to each other are Direct Counters, which means they effectively neutralize each other when forcibly mixed by the will of a magic user or the like. This makes Ice mages incredibly valued in battling Demons, but at the same time, the Demons pose the threat of overwhelming an Ice mage and killing them, through sheer numbers. It's a bit like matter-antimatter annihilation, whichever has more left over is what remains. Another part of why I put Demon as the fire/chaos compound is because... Holy is a compound as well. It struck me as odd to have one and not the other (and, for reference, basically this ENTIRE system was borne of my desire to have "light" and "holy" be present and considered separate elements in a magic system, contrary to most that you might see. It was just another quirk I wanted my system to have when I thought of it. From that concept, the idea of using the 4 classic Elements as well as Order and Chaos came into existence, and thus the previous chart was developed, and tweaked, and now, further tweaks have been made. Also, regarding your worry of Life and Death not being opposites, that too is an intended quirk of the system. Life, Death, and Undeath are intended to be the "Mortal Trinity" of Compounds (as called in-world by magical scholars). Life is borne of earth and water, and as most Living things age, their Life element gradually decays into Death element, causing the effects of aging that we know and love. Wrinkled skin, arthritis, memory loss... It's a consequence of losing your natural supply of Life element, and gaining your natural buildup of Death element. When all of an organism's Life element decays to Death, that is when it dies of old age. When an organism is killed forcibly, its Life element either dissipates, leaving only the Death element it had produced, or its Life element rapidly undergoes Decay to Death, depending on the circumstances of its demise. Also, with Dragon's change to Lightning, this means we have the "Divinity Trinity" of Holy, Light, and Lightning (thor/zeus-like gods confirmed), and yes, electrical spells will be rather effective at killing things. It is the Direct Counter of Life, and it is Compatible with Death. But, Lightning is also Compatible with Undeath. In the right application, lightning spells can defibrilate living things with nonfunctional but relatively healthy bodies, at the cost of converting a slight amount of their natural Life element to Undeath. This raises loads of ethical and moral questions in the medical and magical communities in-world, where mages and philosophers alike have to decide whether it's the right thing to do to someone; allow their death to take place, "naturally", or to cheat death with the cost of becoming a partially undead creature. It's also worth noting that the Compounds between Primes and Aether are now Compatible with that Prime. Death and Air, an airborne sickness or plague. Earth and Light, fluorescent or phosphorescent minerals. Undeath and Fire, eeeh... I'll think about that one some more. Life and Order, well... Intelligent life seeks to impose order on its surroundings. A pack of wolves, a village of people... Holy and Water, well. Holy water. That one's sort of a given. Lightning and Chaos, well, that sort of returns to the issue of "Wildfire" being the chaos/fire element. It'd have to be some sort of made-up substance, wouldn't it. Anyway, feel free to give yet more feedback on this new setup, so that I can yet-again hone in on a more perfect system.

My take on the "steals all abilities" of H-Lerasium vs "steals any power" of H-Atium is that "abilities" refers to all the human attributes that are NOT metalborn powers (physical strength, senses, emotional fortitude, and mental fortitude/memory/intelligence), because those are a part of the extra bit of Preservation investiture inside humans, and so Lerasium is more tuned to that and is able to take it all at once as a charge, perhaps also resisting the Law of Hemalurgic Decay due to being of Preservation. By contrast, H-Atium takes any singular metalborn power (or maybe even something like Surgebinding, idk) from the target, since it's the god-metal of Ruin, the creator of Hemalurgy as an Invested Art. tl;dr, Lerasium is a catch-all for human attributes, and Atium is a wild-card for invested powers.

Actually even Nightblood will reach a point where he/it becomes "full", at least affecting his mental faculties (he starts to sound tired/drunk). So a Larkin would probably just take a nap after absorbing enough Investiture, to "digest" it properly.

Tangentially, reminds me of the idea of Allomantic chewing gum; gum with metal powder mixed in that an Allomancer can chew on and slowly swallow metal powder to keep themselves fuelled for the slow-burn metals like copper or tin.

That could be even worse because then it could create massive amounts of Voidspren, and who knows what it would do to the Unmade to just have that much Odious Investiture lying around.

Number of breaths does not equal total power, afaik. So it would probably just force the awakener to waste their Breaths on the thing.

Probably the Purelake. I love seafood so it'd work out great in that regard, plus it just sounds fun living in a place where there's knee-deep(?) water all the time.

People always seem to think of Identity as something greater than it seems to be, currently. At the moment, we know for sure that Identity "keys" investiture to you, specifically. Like an Unkeyed metalmind has power stored but with no label telling the universe who it belongs to, so it's just like "uhhh okay" and lets anyone with the appropriate feruchemy tap the metal because it can't compare the Identity label of the power to whoever's trying to access it.

Agreed. I think that is the 5th ideal, and what I think the 4th ideal is something like "I will protect when it is right, until they can protect themselves," effectively an admission that people can be trusted to take care of themselves in the right conditions. Or maybe that would be a better 5th ideal compared to Wanderer's theoretical 4th.

Ok yeah Nightblood would probably just consume the spren and Szeth would lose his Skybreaker powers. Unless there's some REALLY obscure hack you can do to prevent that.

Yes, precisely. That's why Abrasion with feruchemical steel is so cool.

Nightblood consumes Investiture no matter what form it takes. Including Spren. And as far as we can tell, he absorbs it all and becomes more invested as a result. Nightblood is the most invested non-shard in the entire cosmere, iirc. So no, I don't think Szeth will be able to augment Nightblood with just his one Highspren with a net gain of abilities on his part. He would probably lose his Skybreaker powers, and Nightblood would become vaguely more powerful, I guess. As to what happens when Nightblood does become as invested as an entire shard, well, that's open for debate. I have no idea if it even would matter.

Much like the old (possibly mis-attributed or made up, i dunno) Thomas Edison quote of "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that do not work."

Interesting! I believe I saw that theory in one of the threads in the Elantris/Emperor's soul topic. It would be interesting, and I can agree with the logic behind it. The biggest issue is figuring out how to power both Forging and Soulcasting at the same time, since both have location-based fuel sources (Dor and Stormlight). If you brought charged gems to Sel, I think that would be the most optimal in terms of minimizing the finnicking you'd have to do to get stuff to work.