Duxredux

Huh. Didn't know that. That said, this area of effect issue should also be addressable with wrapping it and or you with aluminum.

I don't recall a thread on Allomantic grenades after TLM, so I'll put one here with a few thoughts. In TLM we see some advancements in Allomantic grenade tech. Instead of getting briefly charged and then using Allomancy a few seconds after the charge, we see grenades that can hold a charge for quite some time and then be toggled on and off. Despite the drawback that the powers seem to be omnidirectionally deployed, this small development changes a lot. We've seen the following powers used with some effectiveness. We see some applications of Marasi using a Steel grenade to some limited effect in TLM. We've seen Cadmium used quite effectively, Bendalloy, and the Set likes using the cubes for Leeching. Granted that last seems a bit iffy, as the first grenade is recovered after Irich lobs it at Marasi... and Marasi just picks it up and keeps it. There's quite a few Allomantic powers that are rather pointless to put into a grenade until tech advancements allow them to be combined with other components. Pewter, Tin, Aluminum, Duralumin, Gold, and Electrum basically do zilch unless combined with something else. Steel, Iron, and Brass are iffy to use with minimal control, though Zinc could probably work well for riot control. Copper, Bendalloy, and Cadmium are the ones that change the least from how they are used conventionally and are some of the more useful and intuitive powers to put in a grenade. So, why do I say this changes a lot? You've probably noticed the metal I haven't mentioned yet: Nicrosil. Every Allomancer now has Duralumin in their pocket. It's toggleable, holds a charge for a long time, and there's none of this throwing around important equipment business. Because the Allomancer retains control over their own targeting, they can now effectively use Duralumin almost as easily as Vin. You need someone to charge it periodically, but that's way easier than Hemalurgic Duralumin. There's also other applications of a grenade that holds a charge and is toggleable. For example, take a Steel-charged grenade, wrap it on all a sides with Aluminum and install it and the switch into a gauntlet and you have limited Iron Man repulser gauntlets. Charge your grenade with Iron instead, and you have limited Spiderman tethering. TSM spoilers: Era 3 with a Nicrosil protag is going to be interesting.

So... there's a few potential complications to really make this useful as a lone Mistborn or Hemalurgist. The core idea here is to combine Marasi and Wayne's powers into a single person and I'll try to explain why there are a few hurdles to jump through to make this more useful than only using Bendalloy or working separately like Marasi and Wayne. In general, in order for Cadmium to be useful one of two conditions has to occur: either you can create the bubble external to yourself like with an Allomantic grenade, or you have a friendly ally outside of the bubble who can capitalize on putting yourself and your surroundings in an isolated sphere of slowed time. I'll try explain why this is the case, going with the assumption that the Allomancer in question hasn't learned how to move a speed bubble or change it's size once they've started burning, since we've never seen that done on screen as far as I know. If a Mistborn were to simultaneously burn Cadmium and Bendalloy they would create a shell of slowed time, the outside diameter determined by the size of the Cadmium bubble and the interior diameter the size of the Bendalloy bubble. The Mistborn would remain in normal time and effectively trapped by the shell of slowed time, about the same as if they just used Cadmium except they are more aware and burning their Bendalloy. They can't move the Cadmium bubble once it's put up, and dropping the Bendalloy bubble will drop them back into slowed time at the mercy of the situation outside the Cadmium bubble. Using Cadmium and not just Bendalloy requires a situation where you need a shell of slowed time (Cadmium + Bendalloy) rather than effectively slowing down the entire universe outside of the bubble (just Bendalloy). I can think of maybe a couple of cases where simultaneous burns could be useful, one of which is if you need to barrier to randomize incoming projectile trajectories, but not too many (for example throwing up Cadmium next to a street will probably just have a passing car pop the bubble I think). One method is to try to get back to normal time by putting up the bubbles asynchronously as we see Wayne and Marasi do, starting with how we see it used in the books, but this is dependent on the relative sizes of the bubbles, and we never got a clear answer on how big Cadmium bubbles are (size of a room). Marasi slows time and walks along the perimeter of her bubble, waiting for Wayne to pull her into normal time. The issue here is that you have to trust that the situation outside the bubble is safe enough for you to put up the slowed time bubble at the center, move like molasses to the perimeter of the bubble before putting up the Bendalloy bubble to pull yourself back to normal time. This can be mitigated somewhat by using Wayne's usual method of putting up a speed bubble, running to the edge, dropping it and putting up another bubble as fast as possible, but those few second gaps between bubbles will be stretched to minutes, again making the situation outside the bubble and external allies rather important. Let's look at the reverse scenario, putting up the Bendalloy bubble first, walking to the edge and then throwing up the Cadmium bubble. The easiest circumstance is if the diameter of the Bendalloy bubble is larger than the radius of the Cadmium bubble and that it's as simple as walking to the edge of the Bendalloy bubble, burning Cadmium, and walking to the opposite side of the Bendalloy bubble and into normal space. If the Bendalloy bubble diameter is smaller than the Cadmium radius, then we've reduced the time outside the Cadmium bubble a bit, but it may still be minutes between Bendalloy bubbles and that's plenty of time for an enemy to lob a couple grenades around the outside of your bubble. This doesn't remove an important factor though, at least one that I'm guessing exists, that you need to remain within the boundary or at least within very close proximity of your speed bubble in order to keep powering it. In general the Allomancer passing through the outside edge of their bubble pops it as surely as stopping their burn. Forcing an Allomancer to stay within the intersection of the two speed bubbles while everyone outside the Cadmium bubble has unrestricted movement is dangerous. This could be useful in the right scenario, maybe blocking off a hallway, but it's definitely not general purpose. Maybe, maybe, an exception we've seen where there was a speed bubble without someone or something constantly powering it was Wayne's Duralumin enhanced bubble at the end of TLM, assuming that he put up the bubble and that it stayed up after he had burned all of his reserves with Duralumin. If this works, then it may be possible to burn Bendalloy, walk to the edge, burn Cadmium, walk to the edge of normal time, burn Duralumin using all your reserves, and then walk away leaving a slice of space in stasis. That said, aside from being hypothetical as to whether or not you can walk away from it, including Duralumin adds in another complication that you need to have your metals very carefully measured out as Cadmium and Bendalloy have extremely different burn rates. Normally this isn't an issue as two Allomancers doing a normal burn of both Cadmium and Bendalloy will cancel each other out, but that equivalency goes out the window once you include Duralumin. Get the proportions wrong and your Cadmium will probably put the bigger slice of space into next month while you're only in until Tuesday. To conclude, it's very possible to make concentric speed bubbles useful, it's just a lot harder to do it by yourself. In general being able to lob a Cadmium-charged Allomantic grenade is much more useful than a single person trying to put up concentric bubbles. Since Marasi was able to keep and use a Steelpush grenade charged from Wax, she certainly can charge a few Cadmium grenades. Give Wayne a few of those, particularly the ones that he can toggle on and off, and he'll be more effective than a single Hemalurgist with both powers and no grenades. The main drawback is throwing ettmetal around like this makes it quite likely that your enemy will have said grenade unless you plan on waiting for the Cadmium to wear off and retrieving the device. Until we know if the Duralumin gambit works and/or if it's possible to Duralumin enhance Ettmetal burns, going to the effort to combine the powers into a single person is less useful than having them distributed while Allomantic grenades are available.

Interesting. There were plenty of hints in RoW that Pattern was the Ghostblood's secret agent and he has been talking to Hoid behind Shallan's back. I'm not sure if I'd say evil, but I wouldn't discount a hidden agenda. Pattern was selected by committee to go and be the spren bonded to a young girl who had already broken oaths. Either Pattern was very important and influential within the Cryptics to be so chosen for such an important role, or Pattern was expendable and a necessary stepping stone for growth as he himself describes. Either case implies a greater agenda among the Cryptics, but I'm not sure what that agenda would be. The Cryptics seem to be one of the earliest groups of True Spren to choose to reform their Order of Radiants and as far as we know in opposition to Odium's forces. Syl and Ivory were rogue elements among the Honorspren and Inkspren respectively and not representative of the wishes of their peoples. With Pattern behavior around Shallan's Truths, it's worth noting that there are very clear moments when Pattern tries to talk to Shallan about the lies she is clinging to and Shallan totally shuts him out and possibly edits her memory in the process. Shallan is a very unreliable narrator and it's hard to say if Pattern was trying to be helpful or not... because we almost never hear what he said. I read that WoB and it depends on how much wiggle room Brandon gave himself there. That WoB was given at the Words of Radiance release and Brandon was very sneaky and misleading with anything to do with Shallan and her spren. Remember when we saw a group of Cryptics all introduce themselves as Pattern? Testament is a relatively new name given to Shallan's former spren. If you had asked that spren at the start what their name was? They would probably say Pattern. It could be as you say and the usual Pattern was there as well, but I could also see this one just being Brandon trying to be super misleading and obfuscating the existence of Testament. I'm not even going to say that the apparent gender distinction between Pattern and Testament was Brandon lying as I'm not sure if Testament as female was decided 6 years before RoW.

I'd say that the most likely scenario with Miles' execution is that he hid a Goldmind somewhere that the police couldn't reasonably search without risk of killing him, like in his skull or chest cavity. The trick would be placing the metalmind so that it would remain in his body even while he was healing. They probably were to try to make the execution minimally disturbing for the onlookers, but even when you have a Gold Compounder they didn't need to remove his metalminds, they could have just tied him up and shot him until he was dead. As for trace metals, Feruchemy is slightly different from Allomancy I think. Allomancy can be activated unconsciously when the body is under stress, but I'm not sure if you can unconsciously and unintentionally start storing a Feruchemical attribute. With Medallions and unkeyed metalminds the person has to know that there is an accessible attribute before they can use it. It may also be that Feruchemists have to be intentional as to which piece of metal they store an attribute into, Sazed for example had separate Tinminds for his different senses. The fact that Sazed can create an index for his Copperminds implies that you can intentionally store and retrieve specific Investiture from a metalmind. I'm not sure how you would visualize storing into trace metals in the body. Slight tangent, the more I think about it, the weirder it seems that Vin's "Luck" that she got through trace metals was brass. If anything, you would expect the periodic table metals like iron, tin, copper, and zinc to be more easily accessed in trace amounts compared to alloys with precise metal percentages like brass. For that matter, those periodic table metals are found naturally in foods, alloys of 91% tin and 9% lead less so. Despite TLR's suppression of some of the Allomantic metals, that shouldn't change that cadmium and chromium also found in various foods and Allomancers instinctively burn metals with Seekers listening for those pulses. Simplest answer to reconcile this oddity is that TLR removed those metals from the modified crops of the Final Empire.

I'll note that the value of gems and Stormlight is a moving target, particularly with recent advancements. I'll get into that in a moment. To answer the core question, I don't think color affects the quantity of Stormlight a gem can hold, but there are special cuts that increase how long a gem will hold Stormlight. Some of what I'm going to discuss will be found in the Coppermind article on Polestones. At the start of the Stormlight Archive, the economy that determined the value of a color of gemstones was based on their utility in Soulcasters. Emeralds are highly valuable because they power the Soulcasters that create grain and so are mobile producers of food that can support entire armies and cities. It would be expensive, but I think the war camps at the Shattered Plains in WoK could be sustained just through Soulcasting. Gems degrade and eventually break when used for Soulcasting, eliminating the risk of gemstone harvesting oversaturating the market. However, fabrial technology is becoming more and more widespread and advances and commoditization of these fabrials will alter the value of gems as specific color gems are utilized in the manufacturing process of different fabrials. As technology develops, advancements will alter the intrinsic value of a gem based on color. Now valuation of the Stormlight itself is mostly relevant in Shadesmar, though it almost certainly will become commoditized with the growth of the Knights Radiant, Urithiru, and the necessary expenditure of Stormlight to power Oathgate transportation. With Radiants and Shadesmar, thus far it seems like the color of the gem hasn't mattered too much, it was valuable based on the total quantity of Light. Considering Shadesmar and Radiants have methods to transfer light between spheres, the color of the gem becomes a lot less important. We see one of the first cases of bartering for Stormlight in the physical realm in the modern era when Kaladin makes a 2 for 1 gemstone dun to lit sphere trade while flying to Hearthstone at the advent of the Everstorm. That trade value is not going to be consistent, it was fast and simple to work out and Kaladin had more important business. This gets more complicated as Dalinar can now produce Stormlight on demand and the activation of the Oathgates makes the effective distance from Urithiru much smaller as determined by distance from any of the active and ally-controlled Oathgates. So... to answer a broader question, gemstone and Stormlight economics were probably pretty well known at the start of the series, but the advancements in fabrial tech, the return of the Knights Radiant as consumers of Stormlight, Oathgate utilization for mercantile and personal transportation, restoration of Urithiru, first steps into fabrial vehicles, and Bondsmiths that are sources of Light separate from the Highstorm all occurring within 5-10 years should greatly complicate the economics of Light and gems value. Lirin's worries about doctors becoming obsolete with the advent of Surge of Regrowth were well considered though with incomplete data, and I have no idea how other various professions will shake out by the end of the more major advancements we've seen.

Sazed is not Allomancer, he is at first Feruchemist, then Shard. Hence, he is not part of the question at all since he is not using Allomancy, and so the answer is not false because of his existence as a Shard. ...Seriously? What about Vin as a Mistborn holding the power at the Well of Ascension? Vin as Preservation moving the whole planet? Unless the planet was moved via Allomancy, can we agree that the strongest Steelpush that we have seen thus far is Vin flattening Kredik Shaw? We've seen a Mistborn in the process of Ascending to Preservation Push a fortress into the dirt. That earlier WoB where Brandon said that a Mistborn holding the full power of the Well of Ascension could Push Shardblades? We've seen that scenario, just without a Shardblade on Scadrial and Vin decided to give up the power rather than utilize it. We've definitely seen someone with the proper powerset and access to sufficient raw Investiture to Push a Shardblade on screen back in Era 1 without even touching Era 2, it just wasn't relevant. Considering if you stuff enough Allomantic metal in a very weak Mistborn you can do crazy stuff like outrun electricity with Duralumin-enhanced Bendalloy, I'm not prepared to say that it's impossible for a Mistborn to Push a Shardblade with Duralumin and an 10 kilo bag of steel bearings in their gut, but after a certain scale it becomes impractical. Duralumin doesn't allow for that much finesse and it takes time to swallow that much metal, assuming you can suppress the gag reflex of having that much weight in your stomach. It's also mostly pointless if you finally get this setup to work, rip the Shardblade out of the Shardbearer's hands with a Push, it automatically gets dismissed, and they just resummon it while you've Pushed yourself to the next city. Pushing Plate might be more useful and likely has a lower power requirement.

A-Tin combined with F-Copper could make for a potent combination. Being able to take a memory of a crime scene using the full sensory range of a Tineye could reveal pretty incredible details. Auditory enhancement for voice recognition, sense of smell and taste for material identification, comparisons of the crime scene over time, and visual body language cues that can be mentally replayed could be very powerful. The detail that burning Tin lets you see through Mist will let them track a criminal through the Mists which could be very handy. A Slider Connector Twinborn could probably operate a lot like Wayne. Quick change disguises, get into the personas of other people, make friends with clients and suspects really quickly, or go totally unnoticed if the job called for it. Definitely an undercover detective rather than the one visibly employed by the police. Because a lot of crimes in Scadrial are likely to involve metal and metalborn, it means the sensory enhancement granted by Allomantic Steel and Iron could be very significant. A pinch of an Allomantic metal powder that drifts out of a metal pouch may be small enough that a Tineye might miss it if they aren't looking for it specifically, but it will stand out to a thorough Lurcher or Coinshot. Being able to visually identify and confirm Aluminum, Metalminds, and Hemalurgic spikes by line width or absence is also a distinctly useful ability. Unless the suspects are masking their Allomantic and Feruchemical resources with Aluminum this is a potentially faster way to identify Metalborn but can totally be setup as misdirection. Granted with ettmetal primer cubes, maybe even the pulses that a Seeker hears could be falsified. We've also seen Allomantic Steel/Iron specific locks embedded underneath the surface of objects which would be very difficult for the wrong powerset to spot. I guess it depends on what kind of detective character you're going for. Genius mastermind, hard working gumshoe, seemingly bumbling sidekick, different powers promote different character archetypes.

Sorry @Trusk'our, I was trying to come up with positive use cases but mostly thought of risks and hazardous use scenarios. One circumstance that would be very tempting but extremely risky is athletic events. It's totally possibly for athletes to push themselves to unhealthy limits and that's without magically enhanced determination. I used to run cross country and periodically we would have runners go so hard that they would throw up, and I personally ran with shin splints for months before someone told me that much pain while running wasn't normal. I totally believe that some athletes would run themselves dead if given access to F-Electrum. F-Electrum to start a workout? Sure. F-Electrum during a workout or competition? Risky. The flip side is that determination probably can and will help you push you body past safe limits in survival scenarios. Lost in the mountains? Need to walk 5 miles on a broken leg? Last a bit longer until search and rescue finds you? It won't be pretty, but if it gets you to medical care it's better than dying in the middle of nowhere. The main risk is if the increase in determination leads to irrational decisions, so it's a gamble and a balancing act. The commentary on addictive behavior made me wonder if there's risk of addiction to F-Electrum. It's a mind-altering process and people get addicted to both stimulants and depressants all the time. Now there wouldn't be sensory or motor function impairment, so risk of DUI or overdose is out, but if there's a chemical response in the brain that is caused by F-Electrum without magical protection, then it can be addictive. Now clearly not all potentially addictive behavior causes addiction, like shopping, eating, or media, but the very nature of the cyclical pattern of F-Electrum is worrying and would make want to keep a very close eye on any friend that was a Pinnacle Ferring. Having depression be the default that can always be accessed and must be experienced to get a limited supply of determination could be problematic. This Feruchemical power more than most needs a positive use case for active storage and I'm not sure what that would be. There's a WoB that caffeine could potentially be used to store wakefulness in a Bronzemind, but that tapping that storage would produce some of the physiological effects of caffeine, so trying to offset F-Electrum with medication or stimulants probably would have similar issues. Hm... actually, continuing with that idea, people can store at unhealthy levels with Feruchemy. It might be possible to break your mind during active storage in order to glimpse the Cognitive and or Spiritual Realm. Madness and poor mental health have high significance in the Cosmere and being able to do a controlled high dive off the mental catastrophe curve and come back up on demand might have important ramifications. It would probably be a disturbing and fascinating read if a Pinnacle Ferring was trying to track someone operating in the Cognitive Realm. Yeah... I'm trying to think of ways to offset the depressive state and I'm not coming with practical methods. Depressive episodes as a byproduct of trying to establish good habits, addiction recovery, or increased productivity sounds like it could backfire. Longterm low level storage is probably known as dysthymia, or chronic mild depression and it has its own set of issues separate from major depression.

Way of Kings Prime spoiler:

alder24's second WoB answers this. No idea if this is the upper or lower bound for moving Shardblades and Plate, but if you have sufficient power to move a planet, modify genetics on a global scale, change large scale topography, and become a Sliver just by holding the power, then yes, you can also Push Shardblades. I guess that level of granularity is useful where you can squish a single Shardbearer and not have to resort to throwing a mountain at them or yeet their planet into the sun, but you probably have bigger items on your agenda at that point. Trae Cooper (paraphrased) Why are Invested objects like metalminds and Hemalurgic spikes able to be Pushed and Pulled on, but Shardblades and Shardplate, which are also invested, are not susceptible to Pushing and Pulling? Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased) There were a few concepts that he outlined in answering this question. 1.) The ability to Push/Pull an Invested object is predicated to the amount/power of the Investiture. 2.) Further, Invested objects also gain resistance to pulling/pushing based on proximity to soul possibly via the soul. An example given is that a Hemalurgic spike touches the blood of the person, and from there is now part of both the Spiritual Realm and the Physical Realm. This provides what Brandon termed a kind of "soul interference," based on its proximity to the soul. This further explains why Vin required more than normal power to Push/Pull the metalminds from the Lord Ruler, because of their proximity to his soul, via the Spiritual Realm. 3.) The amount of Investiture is relatively low on Scadrial, whereas worlds like Sel and Roshar are pushing around "high power" according to Brandon. I interpreted this to mean that Hemalurgic spikes and metalminds have low amounts of Investiture compared to Shardplate and Shardblades. Brandon said that theoretically you can Push/Pull Shardblades and Shardplates but you would need to wield an incredible amount of power. One example he gave that could so such as a thing is that if you were a Mistborn wielding the full power of the Well of Ascension, you could Push/Pull Shardblades/Plate. DragonCon 2012 (Sept. 4, 2012)

Addressing the last few posts, you can totally poison someone at the lower Heightenings, that's how Lemex died. Breaths don't wear out too significantly at a higher level when stored in a person as that is how the God-Kings have accumulated so many Breaths over the centuries (without Peacegiver's treasure, 2 breaths a week for 300-400 years isn't enough to build up to the 10th Heightening). Inheritance practices when life extension and eventually immortality is what is passed down has a fundamental flaw, don't you think? Seems likely to create tension between the firstborn and their siblings. As for a king threatening subjects to give up their Breath at sword point, why bother when you can work and tax them until they give up their Breath for economic reasons? You can't consistently threaten your workforce with physical violence, as killing them simply destroys the Breath, and it takes considerable manpower, time, and money to keep someone in an Awakener’s prison in addition to keeping them out of the labor pool. It takes time and money to force someone to give up their Breath through duress. Ah, but let them dream, let the poor aspire to greater things, take out loans for things like children's education, farming equipment, or a shop, and they'll gladly give up a piece of their soul. It's how they got Jewel's family's Breaths. They'll get a substantial portion of the costs back through taxes as the family reinvests the capital back into the city anyway and keeps them in the labor pool generating revenue and taxes. Let them fear for their lives and give their Breaths to support the war effort to protect their homes and their sons and daughters marching to war and you have how they collected Breath for the Manywar. The models we see in the Warbreaker work just fine. If that sounds too heartless and coldly rational, I've been reading Pratchett with Lord Vetinari, studying supply chain management, and looking at agricultural business cycles.

If Brandon is writing it, it depends on how closely he wants the scenarios to resemble Mat Cauthon from WoT. Insanely lucky and often drunk sums Mat up quite well. Getting drunk then waking up the next day in a gutter outside town with pockets full of cash and hearing stories about a cheating gambler that got run out of town could totally be a thing. What Mat has that isn't in the Cosmere is fate and the Pattern literally working in his favor, so it depends on how Fortune works fundamentally which is still a big question mark. If you want ideas for irresponsible use of luck, Mat's a good reference, the gambling, drinking, womanizing punk.

In all fairness, like Ruin who corrupted them, they have become caricatures, having lost their humanity. You literally have Marsh under the influence of Ruin looking up into a blood-red ash-choked sky and thinking about how beautiful it is. It's totally goofy and over the top, especially if you look at it as Ruin playing with his puppets like dolls, giving them persona(s), and tucking them in bed for night-night. It can totally be humorous. Right up until you look at what this is doing to Marsh, still aware and unable to even kill himself to stop the atrocities caused by his own hands, even when those hands are trying to kill his friends.

Let's see... to answer your questions the first question that needs to be answered is to what extent are Aetherbound different from Aether spores? A lot of your questions are answered for spores, but we haven't seen enough Aetherbound to know. In ToTES, the speed of growth of verdant is compared to lightning and Tress creates a climbable vine tree by flicking a drop of spit onto the emerald sea when climbing the Crow's Song. Growth rate and maximum growth possible from a single verdant spore is well documented and forms the basis for the timers on their cannonball technology after the initial burst of growth. The zephyr spore pouches used to fire cannons are also generally measured out to get at least mostly consistent shots. So, yes, mass conversion calculations for Aether spores, growth rates, etc. are already being done in-world. Most of this probably applies to Aetherbound, but I don't know to what extent. Who knows if Silajana needs extra water to speed the growth or is constantly regulating the growth rate so as to not be too explosive. It could be that the growth rate is very fast and Silajana simply takes minute portions of water at a slower rate. No idea to what extent time dilation will affect things. I don't remember if Twinsoul ever was caught in one of Marasi's Cadmium bubbles, but I don't think he was. Presumably the communication between Aetherbound and their Prime Aether is Connection based and instantaneous on the order of tamu keks, span reeds, or Seon calls. In the case of spore eaters, the water absorbed from the host almost certainly is transported via Connection shenanigans to the prime Aether on the moon, so I'm guessing water transfer also happens as instantaneously as communication. As for speed bubbles, even Harmony wasn't able to communicate with Wayne in the extreme Duralumin-enhanced speed bubble, so there are limits even for Shards, but I'm not sure to what extent. We've seen the mind of a Shard, Aether's are brand new and while they follow Cosmere rules we've barely seen anything of them. As for your hydration questions, depends on how much you want to delve into the nitty gritty. The Wikipedia articles you'll probably want to look up are hypovolemia, hypervolemia, and fluid balance. You are right that hydration and water are different, and in this case I think you need to lean towards water, not hydration. Aethers react to water and unlike muscle or nervous tissue they don't need to utilize electrolytes to function or produce waste products that have to be expelled via sweat, urine, or excrement. If anything, a saline solution may hinder an Aetherbound compared to pure water. There absolutely is magic protecting someone with a Luhel bond and it's very directly stated as such when Tress almost becomes a dried husk when using Midnight spores for the first time. The degree that she had shriveled up and the speed that she was able to reinflate after drinking water were directly called out as being magically sustained in both directions, so who knows if she went beyond the bounds of conventional hypovolemic shock. Electrolyte imbalance is probably a lower concern compared to the loss of blood pressure that comes with extreme fluid loss as capillaries can no longer refill and the heart has to work overtime to try to force blood through what is basically a deflated hose. Extreme cases of hypervolemia is at more than 40% blood volume loss, which in the context of bleeding can be over 2 liters. As for extreme hydration tricks, you have to carry the water one way or another, it's not like the water in your body weighs less than water outside of your body, though granted more work may need to be done based on distance moved from your center of mass. If you compare the mechanisms of increasing water storage internally (dietary storage capacity of foods that help retain liquid or self-imposed hypervolemia) and external storage (a water bottle, stopping at a drinking fountain, camelbak, etc.) then it looks pretty clear to me that external storage is healthier, simpler, easier, and more scalable. At any rate, a spindly geriatric was doing just fine as an Aetherbound so regulating health and fluid balance as an Aetherbound is certainly feasible and probably not as complicated as it sounds like it could be. Asking if you can hold water in your mouth and access it as an Aetherbound is probably a moot point as people can pretty much chug water continuously and we know that the body can quickly reverse the extreme dehydration caused by a Luhel bond. It's not like Allomancy where someone can leech you and leave your stores drained with no metals to burn. Typical healthy humans have at least a liter or two of water they can utilize and drink back before it becomes dangerous. If you're out of water you're dead anyway.

Yeah, I type slow. I started this back before anyone else had responded. By all means carry on the posts after my mini-essay. One thing that's important to understand, at least as I consider it when reading the WoBs and listening to him talk on podcasts and streams is that there are certain lines that Brandon will not cross when creating the Cosmere, and one of them is he doesn't want to make an in-world confirmed "true" religion because that undermines every other character's belief system. Because of that, on a "how the sausage is made" basis, this topic can and will be discussed in-world but won't have an answer as to the actual nature of deity or lack thereof in the Cosmere. Everything we see in the Cosmere can be explained via Realmatic theory. This complicates these topics. I've never taken a formalized class on the different form of worship or world religions but there's a lot of reasons for why someone may worship something. It can be respect, obedience, or deference, respecting a deific creator in the same way that a child respects a parent. If can be a form of appeasement and seeking favor of a being that is viewed as having great power, an example of this being a humorous Latin quote from Plautus, "enim vero di nos quasi pilas homines habent", with a modernized translation "Ah yes, the gods use us mortals as footballs!". A quick look into the stories surrounding the Greek and Roman gods can explain this sentiment. Worship can be emulation and self-modification, hoping to gain the same characteristics as the target of worship. It can be about alignment or harmonizing oneself with the deity, a concept I think is found in the Shinto belief, but don't quote me on that (the concept of paying respect to nature spirits, or kami which often is translated to god or gods). There's probably plenty of other forms of worship that aren't immediately coming to mind. The concept of deity(s) and how one approaches deity if they so choose is complicated and can be deeply personal. Where things get tricky is that there is a cultural image of deity that we as readers associate with the concept of god. In America at least, a very common illustration of god in various iterations in media is probably an echo of Zeus, bearded man wearing a toga, sits on a cloud, and strikes people down with lightning. For me at least, if feels as if there is a slight anachronism with Jasnah's atheism because some of the concepts that she considers and uses to reject The Almighty and the Shards as deities seem to be based on echoes of Earth's religious cultural, not Roshar's. That's more of a personal feeling and it's not like I've written down specifics, but there are little moments where it feels like Brandon steps away from the culture as has been created in the Cosmere and tries to be representative of the people within his reader base and earth. There isn't anything wrong with that and is one of the reasons he's loved as an author, but the sacrifice is that some of these grittier details can feel choppy. The choice to remove a definitive religion by nature will have the cost that concepts of universal creation, afterlife (The Beyond), and absolute moral law will be incomplete and fuzzy at the details so as to not give too much weight to any single religion. Another way of putting it is that some of the evidences that I use to develop my belief system are absent from the Cosmere, and that's just fine but is a byproduct of avoiding a definitive answer within the Cosmere. To answer OP's question in the end, my take is that there isn't a definitive answer and unlikely to be one, and evidences that would try to support a definitive answer will probably have cracks at the edges when examined too closely. In many ways the Cosmere is an exploration of what would happen if you were to give the powers of creation and divinity to ordinary people and an exploration of the ramifications of such a scenario rather than treatise on Brandon's view on religion masquerading as a collection of fantasy books. Nothing wrong with The Chronicles of Narnia, particularly if you know what you're picking up, but just sayin'. My assumption is that Brandon main intent is to not alienate anyone in his reader base, for example handing a book he wrote to Chaos that is unintentionally narratively super derogatory towards atheists. Brandon has noted that one of the reasons he's had major problems with the Rithmatist sequel is that it had major issues with how it portrayed Native American culture and he thus far hasn't been able to figure out how to address it. Basically, the goal is to be inclusive, representative, and inoffensive at the same time as writing awesome fantasy books.

Here's a WoB that may be relevant. It's the complexity of using an Atium spike to harvest power from a Mistborn. I suspect it comes down to how you have modified and properly prepared the soul of the person receiving the powers. There's a distinction from getting an Invested effect like you could from a Fabrial and granting yourself Invested abilities. What you're describing is more or less what Shai did when she stamped herself with her Elantrian Essence Mark and chugged Unkeyed Dor. In the context of Hemalurgy, the placement of the spike on the Spiritweb of the recipient, particularly with the weird case of using an Atium spike on a Mistborn, it seems like the location on the Spiritweb can inform or otherwise train the Investiture within the spike what power it needs to manifest as. In other words, you need to have tell the Investiture not only what kind of effect to have, but specifically what kind of change needs to be made to the Spiritweb in order to grant powers. I don't think simply humming a tune will work, the detail of the pulses of Invested arts is so intricate that a sufficiently skilled Seeker can differentiate the emotions a Soother is targeting. Intent absolutely is necessary, but Intent alone won't let you hum with that degree of precision. We see something very similar to this with the gardens that Rlain setup in Urithiru. Here's the question though, was it simply the Intent and the proper Rhythm that accelerated plant growth or did the rhythm attract the lifespren that utilized the Stormlight to allow the plants to grow faster? I'm guessing the second because simply having the proper rhythm to hum and a standing in a Highstorm full of Stormlight won't allow a Singer to transform into another form, they need the spren as well. There's also whole skillsets that definitely would not benefit from the person having to be singing or humming constantly. A-Pewter, you would have to be humming or chanting the whole time you're fighting. It's really hard to do heavy exercise and sing at the same time. Possible, but hard. Can you imagine if Vin had to hum a fast tempo the entire sprint across the central dominance? What about using A-Tin hoping to be an unobtrusive spy? What if you need to Surgebind underwater? What if you really want to use two powers simultaneously? Cool idea, maybe useful in specific scenarios, definitely not a final solution.

Considering the shenanigans we suspect Bondsmithing to be capable of, most would speculate that yes, with enough Investiture or hacking you most likely will be able to modify the Commands of an Awakened object. That said, as long as you are fine speaking each time I think it's possible to overwrite Commands with no additional Investiture. At a fundamental level, Command overwriting or modification is possible even for the most basic of Awakened objects and it doesn't even require the lowest Heightening. Presumably this is what happens when you initially command a cloak to "Protect Me" and later as a Drab speak "Your Breath to Mine". The question then is why is Command modification not just the default? I have an idea that it takes an extra step rather than just grabbing a rope and saying "Lift Me" and then "Grab When Thrown". Notably, at the end of Oathbringer, we see Hoid Awaken a doll and use it to coax a newly orphaned girl away from her dead mother before giving her to a new family. He touches the doll and whispers something clearly was intended to modify the Command used to Awaken the doll. I noticed this time that he tells the doll to "Forget what I told you before, instead take care of her". Overwriting Commands in pre-Awakened objects might be as simple as including a Command to clear the last Command before giving new instructions. Sure we could say that this is just Hoid being Hoid and mystic and all, but I think it would totally work for this to simply be something that Awakening can do. TSM Spoiler:

TSM spoilers

If you're going for minimal trauma to the body to prep them to become a Lifeless, then I have three options. Option 1 is bleed them out while replacing their blood with ichor alcohol. This skips to the step where you need to flush the circulatory system to make a long lasting Lifeless, minimizing decay to the body caused from being dead. A medical professional would need to say how painless a form of euthanasia this is though. Option 2 is Soulcast the living person into stone to prep them to become a Phantom. Option 3 is to use a Soulstamp to make the person die from a stroke or something similar. Person dies, soul gets ejected, seal breaks, body reverts, still dead. Shardblade probably works in a pinch, but these options are either more direct or have less side effects.

Well, no, I don't think the mechanism or necessarily even the relationship for family creation would necessarily be what Syladin fans are looking for, hence why there isn't necessarily causation with regards to sexual attraction. It's the formation of a new honorspren, the personification of oaths and nobility, which is an ironic version of offspring from a platonic romance, and entirely separate to the branch of speculation than the one I've seen kicking around that the blue-skinned Natan people have honorspren heritage. I wasn't even thinking in this direction until you reminded me that Soulcasters are True Spren. Age may have nothing to do with the size of a spren, but it also might explain why the True spren of Soulcasters are described as small, with the alternative simply that their substances is divided between the physical and cognitive realms. They're not mutually exclusive, and the material of a Soulcaster is much less than a full Shardblade. Besides if you're worried about child conscription, you're going to have to address the ethics of the spren that have been sleeping as Soulcasters for the last 2000 years somehow. Either they were awake prior to the Recreance and the Recreance somehow put them to sleep (easiest explanation is that they were bonded to Radiants and fit the rest of that pattern), or at the height of the Knights Radiant they convinced dozens of these spren to go to sleep indefinitely for the war effort and made no effort to wake them after they won the False Desolation and proceeded to the Recreance. If the fabrial spren fell comatose at the capture of BAM and added into the horror the led into the Recreance, why did the Oathgates remain awake? You also have to explain the rarity of fabrials that grant Surges: 5th Ideal requirement, voluntary coma, or other? The very existence of squires confirms the sharing of Surgebinding beyond the core Radiant and spren anyway, and generally at greater numbers than presumably one person holding a fabrial Soulcaster. Why build these fabrials when squires, Radiants, and long distance teleportation via Oathgates are a thing anyway? Having them be a summonable/retrievable method for a Radiant to remotely activate of Surges and being able to grant Surges to others as a byproduct seems reasonable, particularly if it didn't necessary deplete the possible ranks of new Radiants by tying up a spren that could eventually become Blade and allow summonable Plate. In fact, considering the Nahel Bond was the solution to copying the Honorblades and giving the power of Surgebinding to mankind, I'm far more comfortable with the idea that they figured out how to grant Surgebinding to others as the greatest expression of the Nahel bond at the 5th Ideal rather than simply figuring out a fabrial hack that totally bypassed the need for the Radiant bond to grant Surgebinding in the first place. As Syl notes when Kaladin fights Szeth, giving someone the powers of surgebinding without the checks of a spren bond is dangerous, and even the Honorblades were given to mankind as part of the Oathpact. I'll also note that the Coppermind notes this: Vorin teachings claim that [Soulcasters] came from the Almighty, through the Knights Radiant.[25] Though I'm not sure which passage it's referring to. Backing up to the question of where the spren would come from to form a fabrial at the Fifth Ideal, do we even know how the windspren that comprise Kaladin's Shardplate came to be formally incorporated into the Nahel bond? Higher ideals with more spren getting incorporated into the bond doesn't necessarily mean that they will be damaged by the Recreance to the same extent that the Deadeye Shardblade spren that formed the core of the Nahel Bond. Even Dead Shardplate forms partial bonds and Soulcasters almost certainly form bonds if they allow Surgebinding and Savantism. It seems a logical extension that a 5th Ideal Fabrial spren might just sleep rather than have their eyes gouged out as they aren't the core of the original Nahel Bond.

It's not though. Spren have lineage. A newly born human has Connections to it's parent, it's race, and the Cosmere has plenty of important heritable traits passed on via Spiritual DNA (not Physical, Spiritual). Who your parents are is totally a Connection. A spren child of a spren and a Radiant would totally have a Connection to both the Radiant and their Spren. The WoB implies that there are more than just narrative reasons for spren of the opposite gender to be drawn to a Radiant and that sexual preference is an influence. Seems relevant to procreation.

Fair point. Uh, uh... I have a pure speculative idea, but a question first, do we know how spren procreate? They are the cognitive manifestations of concepts of nature and ideas. Honorspren are the children of the Stormfather, but I don't think that can be the case for all True Spren. So... the idea is that this isn't necessarily how all new True Spren are born, but for lack of a better term, what if the small unresponsive Radiant spren that manifests as a Surge granting Soulcaster is the brain child of the spren and the Radiant? There isn't necessarily a formalized Nahel bond, yet there undoubtedly would be a Connection. Lotta speculation, but it does put Notum's stance that the Nahel bond is far more intimate a relationship than if Kaladin and Syl had eloped. Syl and Pattern are also distinctly fascinated with procreation There's also this: So... the idea is that while this isn't the case for all True spren, and Notum himself is the great-grandchild of one of the 10 spren that the Stormfather created after the Recreance, perhaps there's another method for True spren to be born and that this is something that can happen as a Radiant becomes more closely Connected via the Nahel Bond to their Spren and as they more closely embody the ideal of the spren itself up to swearing the 5th Ideal. Yeah, wasn't sure how to phrase this one when I know that there's a pretty low bar for age range on the Shard. No, I'm not a die-hard Syladin shipper, not that I have anything against them. I'm fine if this is totally separate from my original 5th Ideal Fabrial idea.

Not necessarily. This could be as simple as anyone who has ever accidentally hurt someone that they cared about and seeks self-mastery. One of the more transformative moments for me personally in the way I interact with people stems from when I accidentally said something that hurt a friend in high school and I saw it on their face. Since then I've slowed down a lot and thought through what I say. This extends also to anyone who has any sort of power through relationships, position, finances, etc. even if has nothing to do with Invested Arts. It's the people who look out and see jerks in the world and stop to ask "am I one of those jerks?" Dustbringers have a bad rep, but I see myself in this aspect of their ideals.

I'm going to speculate for a few paragraphs here on ways to possibly get more than 5 Oaths. Idea one, is that the Oaths are forming a stronger and stronger Nahel bond. There's hints of this, with Kaladin being able to hear and communicate with Syl telepathically while she's imprisoned on the ship in Shadesmar. I assume that this is the person becoming increasingly more aligned with the Ideal and in Kaladin's case more aligned with Honor and subsequently a better vessel for Stormlight. There is such a thing as a perfect container for Stormlight and we see those in perfect gemstones. The idea here is that there is a logical upper limit to how perfectly someone can be a vessel for Stormlight in addition to alignment with the Ideal. With the gemstone analogy it's the distinction between a person becoming complete or finished rather than simply indefinite flawed growth. Idea two is that there has to be a logical reason for why 6+ Ideals have never ever been sworn and how this functionally is different from 5th Ideals. One option is if there are "resonate" Ideals that mix and combine the oaths for someone who somehow has successfully bonded the spren of two different orders. I think we can see how insanely difficult this could be as it looks like it would require some sort of consensus between the True Spren. Crazy shenanigans would have to happen. Idea three is that if there was groupings that had more than 5 oaths, it could be the Radiants with Enlightened Spren, because I don't even know how the system setup with Honor and Cultivation with progressive Oaths even works with Enlightened Spren. Do they even have Oaths? That WoB from alder24 doesn't actually confirm that they have an Oath system and Brandon hasn't given a straight answer when asked directly: After writing this out, I'm leaning more and more towards first idea, that the oaths are alignment to a Platonic ideal, and each oath is about further alignment to that ideal. It's like trying to make a more than perfect gemstone, there isn't a higher degree of perfection than something that can indefinitely hold Stormlight with no decay. There is variability within each level of oath of how well a Radiant aligns with the ideals, Kaladin shows this in WoR, and the idea is that the 5th Ideal's upper bound is that degree of perfect alignment to the ideal. I think maybe a Radiant that somehow perfectly fit the Ideal wouldn't leak Stormlight, but that it's nearly impossible. Here's another way of imagining this. Try drawing a circle. Okay, now do a better one. Try using a piece of string. Now a compass. Perfect yet? Sharpened your pencil or chalk to micron accuracy? Okay, hypothetically you have finally drawn the platonically idealized circle. By definition, adding or removing anything to this circle will be moving away from the ideal circle. You can't do better, it is perfect, complete, and finished. To be clear, I don't think that swearing the 5th Ideal puts a Radiant at this degree of perfection, rather the 5th Ideal encompasses the perfect Platonic Ideal and having sworn the 5th you've just ticked past the 80% alignment mark (an arbitrary number, but you get the point, not 100%), and that you can fluctuate within that 80%-100% range without breaking Oaths. From this standpoint, it's possible for a 5th Ideal Radiant to do a lot of soul searching and reach an epiphany that helps them more closely align themselves to their Ideal rather than resorting to breaking their Oaths and jettisoning their spren. They might even phrase the epiphany in a similar manner to their oaths. They could even share it with other members of their order and have it genuinely help them understand better and progress faster within their Ideals. I think this is even possible to have this sort of epiphany of pithy statement in the middle of the 3rd Ideal. This is separate from the formalized process that first allows drawing in Stormlight, initial Surgebinding, gaining a Shardblade and the ability to have squires, gaining Shardplate, and if there is another special aspect to the 5th Ideal that we don't know yet, then it requires the 5th Ideal to actually formalize that advantage. Will saying out loud and have their spren confirm that it is putting them on the right track get them closer to their ideal? Yes, but not in a formalized manner that would give them a Shardblade or Plate at the lower Ideals. ... I wonder if the reason the Recreance was complete and so poorly understood in the modern era was because Nale hunted down and killed any stragglers that were not Skybreakers. Perhaps it wasn't a unanimous decision among the other nine orders, Nale just... tidied up.