Duxredux

Sure did. I think all of those descriptions are technically accurate.

Wax: Twinborn companion of one of the most (in)famous lawman shooters in the Roughs. Gets shot a lot. Wayne: wealthy lawman that formerly was in charge of Weathering, came to Elendel and dispensed justice. Known to go by "Waxillium Ladrian". Elend: Mistborn hero that kills Inquisitors. Champion for the common Skaa. Vin: nobility (empress counts, right?) that acquired forbidden books and avoided dancing at balls by reading. Dalinar: supervisor of scientist ardents, reader of scholarly works, and writer. Navani: Bondsmith that holds the Coalition of monarchs together. Kelsier: an immortal being no longer quite human, came to the Well of Ascension and gained power. Probably now a Mistborn. Uses beggar disguises. Tells stories of a world that no one he talks to could remember. Hoid: powerful allomancer that very frequently disparages the nobility. Has been to the Pits of Hathsin (probably). Fights to oppose a god that rules over an oppressed people.

@Tamriel Wolfsbaine I'm curious, have you read Bands of Mourning yet? I know you were posting topics on Warbreaker while you were reading it, so I wanted to check if you've finished as much of the Wax and Wayne books as we currently have. There's more to this story. If you don't trust Harmony, then technically anything a Kandra says is or does is suspect, but how do the other Kandra view Harmony? What lives do they live and what things do they do? Paalm's story is a tragic one, but she isn't the only Kandra, and she did start nailing people to walls. Maybe this doesn't apply to you, but there's a danger to only looking at a single story, even if it is the first or most memorable. I don't know, maybe that's my issue, that I just hope that Sazed hasn't changed too much over the last 300 years as Harmony, and maybe I admire who he was too much to see him changing. The Kandra were the willing supporters of the Lord Ruler's plan to thwart Ruin, and TenSoon at least still considers himself a champion of Preservation, so I've thought that for the most part they voluntarily continued to protect Scadrial even after Harmony Ascended. There's whole philosophical debates that could be had over freedom and if it needs limitations or methods to get people to do something that preserves free will and if that has limitations. Bringing those up could have this topic explode like some of the other threads though.

So I had a thought while answering another thread. I wonder if Returned could heal injuries by thinking them away. We see Vivenna altering her personal appearance including adding a scar to her face as a disguise. The scar goes away once she drops the guise, so adding and removing that kind of "injury" is within Vivenna's and presumably Vasher's abilities. I wonder if a Returned could convince themselves that they hadn't been injured even though they really had, if they could heal themselves by reasserting their perception of a undamaged body. We see Kelsier's Cognitive Shadow get beaten up until he's on the ground expecting broken bones, but the pain is a function of his mind thinking he should be hurt. Would this be something only a Returned or one of their descendants could do? Any thoughts? It's made me wonder for a while now that the Investiture specifically noted to be tied to life is the worst at healing, with the only major case being when a Returned uses their Divine Breath to heal someone. For crying out loud Vasher deliberately dumps BioChroma into people he intends to immediately kill.

A couple of months late, but I have a theory on this, but it's probably tenuous. Spoiler for the end of the book, but you've had 2 months to read it. The explanation that the agelessness is part of being a Cognitive Shadow does make sense though.

I agree that the bodily structure is enhanced to allow for F-Pewter to work. F-Iron should make you immobile but it strengthens you to compensate. So without too much of a personal background in anatomy and physiology, here's the clues that I see that F-Pewter enhances more than just the muscles, particularly for sustained usage that Sazed was demonstrating in WoA. The contrast is probably best shown with the issues that koloss have. First, the cardiovascular system was seriously boosted to enable him to not have a heart attack suddenly trying to supply blood to a much, much larger mass. I think the heart, lungs, blood vessels, and volume of blood would need to be enhanced to enable the usually slender scholar to use such enlarged muscles vigorously without passing out. This also was before Cadmium or Bendalloy were discovered, so Sazed didn't need to store breath or calories to support his Pewter. The tell that Brandon thought of this and didn't make it part of the limitation of F-Pewter is that koloss die when they get so big the heart can't sustain them and I think they have blue skin from poor circulation (well, the skin is unusually loose too, and the coloration became a heritable trait in era 2... I'm shaky on this one). Sazed was a human-colored hulk among the blue-colored hulks. Middle-aged people often can have heart attacks from the sudden increased stress on the heart when shoveling snow, at the is nothing compared to smacking around koloss. Second, Sazed's skin grows and shrinks with him, so more than just muscles can be boosted by F-Pewter, again contrasted with koloss. Sazed doesn't split at the seams whenever he draws on F-Pewter, nor does he get weird and flabby during storage. Again, contrasted with both young and old koloss. Third is the musculoskeletal system. The ligaments and tendons also need to be strengthened to not break, and I think the skeleton must grow and be strengthened as well, since I don't think only muscle growth will make you as tall as a koloss. So... long answer short, not sure how hemalurgy affects this, but I think kandra have a fair chance of being able to store more than just muscles in F-Pewter. I doubt they would be able to alter the bones of the body, but it could make swapping from a human skeleton to a horse to a bunny to a lion to an elephant much easier. MeLaan just carried around a bunch of skeletons to suit her purposes. Even if storing other mass doesn't work, maybe the kandra could change their mass specifically to human muscle to store it, but once they withdrew it they could change it to whatever else they wanted to. If that works, that would be a fairly trivial extra step for a kandra to be able to change their size and muscles drastically on demand. @StanLemon, to answer the limitations of a human growing large with F-Pewter, I read a book a while back called The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios that looked at Giant Man. As long as you are remaining proportionally human, then as you become bigger you can have issues based on your skeletal structure and leverage. The example in the book dealt with the square-cube law, which is when an object is increased in size proportionally, the surface area increases proportionally to the square of the multiplier, and the volume increases proportionally to the cube of the multiplier. In other words, as something gets proportionally bigger, the weight of the object will increase much, much faster compared to the cross section of the object. As an example, if you had object that was a cube 1 meter in length and weighed 1 kilogram, the cross section would be 1 square meter, and the volume would be 1 cubic meter. If you were were to double it size, the cube would now have one side measure 2 meters, the cross section would be 4 square meters, and volume would now be 8 cubic meters, and it would weight 8 kilograms. Making something twice as tall proportionally can make it 8 times heavier but only give it a cross-section 4 times larger as a base to support that weight. Make something three times as tall, and it becomes 27 times heavier, but only 9 times as wide at the cross section. When applied to the bones of a human body, it means that as you get proportionally taller, you get heavier much faster than the bones grow wide until the bones can't support the weight. I think Kakalios said that the spine would give out first, because it is so small relative to the rest of the body. This gets worse if your muscles are growing much faster from F-Pewter than your skeleton is, making the weight of the body far exceed what the skeleton can support, especially if you are doing strenuous things that put a lot of leverage and multiplied force on your back, like twisting and throwing a koloss or swinging a gigantic sword. Even if you are magically strengthening your skeleton, F-Pewter increases muscle mass and strength far faster than bones, and I would expect the skeleton to break first.

I'm not sure how Brandon will address this, but I trust he'll try to capture the different viewpoints well enough and if not, that the experts he gets to check his work and the beta readers will tell him if he's about to do something extremely offensive. He's mindful about this kind of thing. @Iredomi you're right, there is a huge history of terrible things like slavery, displacement, and cruelty related to colonialism in the world. Even if the events happened centuries ago, the effects can still be felt by the descendants today, even if it's just the socio-economic state that generations of their family have lived in. I know that I grew up with an advantage just because my father worked hard to get out of the trailer park he grew up in and got me a good education, compared to someone who was not handed the money, skills, and legacy of success that I was given. There are generations of groups, ethnic, geographic, and possibly even religious, that for one reason or another handed down wealth or poverty, education or no education, job skills for high wage work or low wage work, stable families or broken families, kindness or abuse, and a lifetime of modeling financial/social/etc. success or defeat. There's more than just those options, but that's life, and it's not fair. I don't know what the solutions are. Making the wealthy pay the difference to the poor has complications. Banishment has complications. That's a topic for whole books to explore, not a post on a discussion board to gain real depth. If anyone is interested I can try to find some online articles on the topic. Whatever the solution(s) is for the Singers, Listeners, and Humans it probably won't look fair from one viewpoint or another, but it might work out to the point that they stop slaughtering each other over it. Maybe.

I have a few clarifying questions for the debate. 1. There's been talk about establishing a frame of reference from a moral, amoral, utilitarian, religious, and secular standpoints, maybe more. What is the purpose or goal of this debate as you understand it? Is it to gain insight and clarity? Is it to learn more viewpoints of philosophy? Is it to convince the other side that they are wrong? Is it because you worry that the other 17th Sharder and their philosophy is wrecking society? Is it to debate because debate is fun? Why are we having this discussion and what result are we hoping for? No, I'm not asking only Frustration even though they started the thread, because it's dependent on each debator. 2. Does the current format and conduct support the goal of the debate? If yes, carry on. If not, what needs to change? 3. Have you gained new insight, understanding or clarity from this debate? If no, is it worth it? If yes, where did that insight come from? Did it come from listening to and understanding the other side or did it come from researching and refining your own argument? I'm not discouraging self reflection or clarifying your own belief system, but in a debate context it can have a polarizing effect of entrenching yourself within your own viewpoint. I ask in part because I had a similar debate with a friend and it nearly wrecked the relationship.

The coppermind page will give you all of the info we have on it, which is admittedly limited. Trellium - The Coppermind - 17th Shard. Speculation includes minor spoilers for the Stormlight Archive. We'll probably have to wait to read The Lost Metal before we find out.

So... speaking as someone who has been in leadership, judgment, and other positions of authority only a handful of times, this feels like a situation I hope never to be in. I don't know exactly how I would act, because the parable is specifically limited on detail, but normal life isn't like that. How was the first man killed? Was it in the dead of night? Was it as part of a brawl in a pub? Was the man clubbed in the back of the head or was he gruesomely mutilated? How old were the supposed murderers? I know none of these details. Should these details matter? I don't know, not without knowing what they are exactly. It's why I think judges are needed, because you just don't get situations like this, or if you do I hope it's very rare. Should Wax have let Wayne live or hang? I'm guessing most of us will never be in as extreme of a situation as the hogman parable, but say you are a parent that comes home to find that someone had stolen money from your emergency fund. The only people in the house are the three kids, but none of them will admit it. What do you do? That is a situation I could believe happening to me in a decade or two. I hope it doesn't, but it could. Another I hope doesn't happen, but what if you come home and it's not money that is missing, it's the gun from your safe, sharpest kitchen knife from the drawer, the machete for clearing fields, prescription medication, or the axe for chopping wood? In essence, what can we learn from this scenario that can apply to something that may happen to some of us? I might get mocked for it, but yes, my judgment may change based on individual circumstances, and my inclination will be to try to learn as much as possible, precisely so I don't have to make the decision that the lord in the story is challenged with. Am I dodging the question? Maybe, but that's because it's one I feel woefully inadequate to answer without more information, both of the event itself and the ramifications afterwards. The concept of looking into a man's face and making the decision on if he lives or dies, unsure if he is a murderer is one that would personally trouble me. It's part of why I've never pursued a career in law. Perhaps I'm a coward for hoping that other people with more training and experience would make a better decision than me. On that note, anyone on this thread actually have a degree or other formal training in law or philosophy? I will note a few things that struck me that I don't think have been mentioned. Exile can have issues, because it can send 3 murderers to be someone else's problem. Roshone was an example of this. No, I don't know if it's better or worse, I'm just saying this solution can have complications. There is such a thing as an overall "punishment" for the innocent that we usually don't think too much on, and that is known as security. It's why there are background checks, screening processes, locks, passwords, escorts, banned items and more. What I can do is restricted because of security, but I usually don't complain because it also keeps me safer. I think there are middle of the road answers that aren't cop-outs, or if they are then most everyone has adopted them already. Did you have to make a password to create your account on 17th Shard so that no one would impersonate you and besmirch the good name of AwesomePossum (pretty sure no one has that name on the forum. If that is your name, I apologize and will try to avoid using your name without permission to prove a point)? Levity aside (not talking about Levity the person on 17th Shard), there are more ways to reduce murders than trial and execution. It might not answer the lord's question, but investigation, analysis, and implementation of safeguards can still make the town safer.

I'm not sure on this one, but Lessie sure is an interesting case. Paalm was one of the Third Generation, and the psychology of that group was quite different from other kandra. Many of the Thirds didn't feel like they had their own personality unless they had a role to play. In her long life she had been the personal agent of The Lord Ruler and possibly had been specifically trained to thwart the plans of Ruin. She saw the fall of first the Sliver of Infinity, Preservation, and then Ruin. She was there when Ruin attempted to take control of the Kandra and likely fulfilled the First Contract's Resolution. I think understanding Paalm's history is part of understanding her. The rest of my thoughts are speculative. I don't think like a Third, but maybe she felt she couldn't reveal that Lessie was a kandra and was still playing the role when she was shot in the head. Maybe after Lessie "died" she was worried that Wax wouldn't believe that Lessie had always been a kandra, that he would think that she was an impersonator defiling Lessie's corpse (that exact thought may have let Wax shoot her with the hemalurgic bullet in the end, so a valid worry I think). I'll say this, we don't really know what happened between Lessie's death and Bleeder coming to Elendel. It was confirmed by TenSoon that Harmony had tried to take control of Paalm once, but no information was given on the specifics. Maybe it was at Lessie's death, maybe if Paalm tried to go back to Wax, maybe Harmony attempted it directly after Paalm acquired the Trellium spike, we don't know unless there's a WoB. We don't even know how long it was before SoS that Paalm got the spike. Harmony said in the end of BoM that the spike had permanently damaged her mind, so I don't even know how much of her rationale was always what it looked like as Bleeder, or if obtaining the spike and jettisoning her original blessing twisted her mind too much. For that matter, I don't even know if she got the Trellium spike of her own free will or if she was duped. What we do know is that she got the spike and set out the free Wax and cripple Harmony's influence. She wouldn't have been very stable with only one spike anyway, but the Trellium was specifically bad for her mind. Her actions were incredibly methodical, but... somewhere she stopped trying to just be with Wax and committed suicide in his arms, her desire for freedom overruling her desire to be with him.

I've recently listened to Mistborn 1 and Alloy of Law within a short span of time. I noticed something that I thought was pretty cool and wanted to share it. To set the stage, here's the end of Mistborn: The Final Empire. Spoilers of course. Vin sets off to confront the immortal Lord Ruler in his palace, Kredik Shaw. She gets captured by Inquisitors and put in prison, her mistcloak and metals stripped from her. Skipping forward a bit, Sazed gets himself captured so that he can come to her aid by ripping the door off of her cell. They run down the hall defeating soldiers, Sazed low on attributes, Vin drained of metal reserves. They come across Elend Venture accompanied by guards, who have come to save Vin. Vin and Sazed prepare to flee, until Vin spots a tassel from her mistcloak sticking out of the closed lid of a trunk. She recovers her lost cloak and metal reserves, saves her future husband, and continues on to confront the Lord Ruler. There she draws upon the mist and defeats the immortal Lord even while he was in the process of crushing her to death by his Steelpush. Fast forward 300 years to the end of The Alloy of Law. Even more spoilers. Waxillium sits in the Breaknaught with Vindication, carried by the Vanishers to their lair, preparing to confront the nigh-indestructible Miles Hundredlives. There the door to the vault is ripped off by the Vanishers, and Wax causes havoc among the gang members. He, Wayne, and Marasi fight until they are low on weaponry, metals, and Feruchemical storages. Wax gets injured in an explosion and hides among some crates. There he calls upon Harmony, Sazed, for some help. Sazed responds and sends him a little help in the form of a trunk with his old possessions, marked by the tassel of his mistcloak duster sticking from beneath the lid. Guns and cloak recovered, Wax goes on to save his future wife (possibly draws upon the mists) and defeats Miles with the help of Marasi, even while Miles was methodically beating him to death. It's such a little detail, a tassel of a mistcloak signaling a hidden reserve of resources that brought victory, but Sazed was there for both of them. I doubt Wax knew the significance of the event that Sazed was alluding to with the tassel, but I think Sazed was honoring Wax by connecting him to Vin. There's always another secret, and Brandon still surprises me with books that I read a decade ago.

I agree with @SwordNimiForPresident, that Wax probably isn't fueling Allomancy with Feruchemy, he's just augmenting his ability to push indirectly though basic physics by increasing his weight. I have an additional thought as to why I don't think it's converting power further down that works better with some setup. What @Halyo_Alex and @ShardlessVessel describe in Feruchemical abilities being able to support or augment Allomantic abilities has been somewhat explored and confirmed, though you may not be getting the same levels of near-infinite Feruchemical stores by fueling Feruchemical attributes with Preservation's power. I might be looking at it from a different way though. The advantage that Feruchemy has over Allomancy is that for the most part there aren't limits to how much of an attribute you can withdraw at a time. There are exceptions, but it's more of a survival standpoint - compress too much F-Brass heat and you immolate yourself, run too fast with F-Steel and you burn up from atmospheric friction. Allomancy has a general set power level from burning and flaring of metals, but there's only so much power you can get out of your metals. I'm pretty sure it's been confirmed that you can store alternate attributes in metalminds, for example A-Pewter power can be stored into F-Pewter, and you would be able to withdraw it as A-Pewter. The key here is that I assume that you would then be able to compress that allomantic attribute the same way you can compress other stored strength, enabling you to double or triple the power of A-Pewter beyond what a normal Thug could do. It would be similar to A-Duralumin fueled bursts of power, except you would be able to regulate the output and have something left in the tank after punching through a wall or tossing a Koloss into the air. This would be more than just making metalminds into allomantic batteries, it would let you get enormous bursts of allomantic power beyond what can normally be gained through just burning the metal. That by itself opens up a lot of possibilities. I suspect that the metal storing the attribute has to share the attribute, not the metal. Pewter works because both attributes are strength based, F-Tin I think can store both A-Tin and A-Bronze. I'd be surprised if a Bendalloy compounder could convert calories into speed bubbles though. Because Feruchmy is an internal art, I don't know how it works to boost some of the external metals, like A-Iron and A-Steel. Except, we know that somehow you can boost A-Iron and A-Steel. The Bands of Mourning enabled Marasi and Wax to perform Allomantic feats far beyond what Kelsier was able to do in life, to the extent that Wax was able to see the signature of souls using Steelsight. As far as I could tell, he wasn't tapping attributes except probably Nicrosil when he was on the airship when he was bargaining with Suit to disarm the ettmetal bomb, and he certainly wasn't tapping weight yet. So... I'm guessing that you can boost Allomantic abilities beyond the norm with F-Nicrosil, but I don't know enough how that works. The Bands would be my go-to for somehow getting Feruchemy to support Allomancy, but they're a weird case. I think F-Duralumin could potentially boost your strength and finesse with emotional allomancy, not because you're converting between the powers but because increased Connection may boost your ability to manipulate the target. Unless... if emotional allomancy is Connection based and the ability to Push or Pull on emotions can be stored as Connection and later compressed, but I'm not versed well enough to know if that works mechanically. I'm guessing not, since Connection is a spiritual attribute and it seems like Zinc and Brass work on the cognitive side. I could see F-Chromium being able to store A-Electrum, enabling you to compress it. That could be pretty cool actually, if you could see what you do next up to 30 seconds in advance.

Unless I'm reading the question wrong, the idea was to use Shardblades as armor, precisely because Shardblades are nearly indestructible. You're right that normal Windrunner Plate is windspren and I think Elsecaller Plate is logicspren, but we're talking about cobbling armor together out of Blades which would be the Radiant spren itself. At least that's the concept that I'm responding to, which could be off.

I stand corrected, and the rationale and limitations of F-steel make sense as described by @Frustration. How about F-Bendalloy and Lift's ability to metabolize food into Lifelight and Surgebind with it?

Hmm... Breeze - honeyguide. It's a bird that leads humans to beehives so that it can get the humans to do the dirty work and eat the honey itself. It also lays its eggs in other bird nests so that the other bird has to do the work to incubate the eggs. Spook during Mistborn 1 - meerkat. Syl - hummingbird or an excitable puppy. Ham - one of the great apes, possibly in "The Thinker" pose. Kelsier - blobfish. According to Hoid. Gaz - chull.

I think this could work theoretically, but I'm not so sure in practice. A major difference between living Shardblades and Radiant Plate beyond durability is the intelligence of the spren. I have a hard time seeing Highspren or Honorspren agreeing to be your boots. Okay, maybe you could convince Rua, but good luck with the other boot. If you need a sapient spren for each individual piece of armor, that's a lot of egos that you have to talk into basically hugging you to keep you protected, especially since you aren't even the one they bonded with in the first place. Maybe other spren species would be more amenable, but it seems like it could go wrong really easily and would be a lot of hassle. I agree with @Dunkum, that you would probably need to put this over standard Shardplate. Without strength enhancements, this shardbladeplate would probably be too heavy to be practical.

That pairing is actually more useful than just going really fast. You could probably use F-steel for the initial acceleration and actively store speed for the deceleration as well. If you used Abrasion well, you would be able to regain most if not almost all of your expended speed, since you wouldn't have loss of velocity or momentum from friction, which is where most of Feruchemical speed ends up getting used. (I know that double posting is generally frowned on, but it feels odd to add it to a comment that has already been reacted to. Also, this is an entirely separate idea, so hopefully no one minds too much)

I think there is something to the idea that Elend as a good person made Dox uncomfortable with his past actions. I still remember the conversation Vin had with him (while trying to figure out who the kandra impersonator was) where Dox came to the conclusion that he was a monster for killing so many noblemen. That conclusion didn't happen overnight, and interacting with Elend repeatedly proved that the nobility weren't intrinsically evil. That seems like a really hard conclusion to personally arrive at, that even if Dockson was a better bureaucrat, Elend was a kinder ruler. I don't know if I would have been as willing to see things that way or admit them. Maybe Dox hated Elend for showing him that the way he had lived was wrong. I do think there's good evidence that Kelsier intended Dockson to rule, especially after Yeden died (well... probably before Yeden died).

I wonder... I like the idea of F-Duralumin and A-Malatium. I don't know if those abilities would interact with each other as much as I think they might, but I could see it making me much better at understanding other people. It wouldn't have the same responsibility that comes with some of the really powerful abilities, but I might be able to become a really awesome therapist without emotional allomancy. That's something that is sorely needed in the Cosmere.

I'll throw a couple thoughts out here. I also had the theory a while back that aluminum was possibly Adonalsium's godmetal, but I used different sources for that theory. It probably isn't, but he's RAFO'd that exact question in 2018. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/475/#e15055 Where I came to the conclusion that Aluminum might have been a godmetal came not from the mechanics but from aspects of books and WoBs. I need to reread them, but I think Emperor's Soul and Stormlight both have legends of aluminum falling from the sky, in Roshar it was rumored to be resistant to Shardblades (confirmed aluminum, https://wob.coppermind.net/events/176/#e8489). I checked, and I don't think Aluminum is a common substance in meteorites. Where did it come from then? Aluminum was not considered one of the 16 metals in Preservation's plan to reveal Atium mistings https://wob.coppermind.net/events/35/#e2524 Reasons I have for thinking that aluminum isn't Adonalsium's godmetal: It's an easy soulcasting product and can be conventionally produced in modern era. It can be formed naturally without a perpendicularity, which seems telling (unless the Ashmounts were a perpendiularity of Adonalsium which seems really, really unlikely). We have this WoB that says Ralkalest was probably a Yolish term. https://wob.coppermind.net/events/472/#e14900 I think that implies that it was around pre-shattering? That doesn't discount it being Adonalsiumium, but there's no similarity at all between the terms Ralkalest and Adonalsium, and there probably would be if it was the godmetal.

There's a lot of interesting issues and perceptions going on here. Harmony gets quite a bit of flak for how he handles Wax, but try contrasting it with Odium's work to turn Dalinar into his champion or Sazed's own life experiences as the prophesied Hero of Ages. Who was given more free will? I don't think it's a simple or easy process to become a champion of a Shard and embody their attributes. Wax is good at killing other people, but he really didn't have a good handle on personal acceptance of pain, change, or death. I probably don't either, but I think that was something integral that aligned Sazed to both the powers of Ruin and Preservation. For the record, my opinion is that until everything is done and done, attempting to judge the actions of something that can see the future will always have incomplete information. I agree that Wax is probably Harmony's sword. I also think that Harmony had far more in mind than simply bringing Wax back to Elendel than to stop the Vanishers, considering that's what put Wax onto the trail of Mr. Suit, the Set, and eventually Trell. In the process he also saved Steris his future wife and Marasi, someone that Harmony worked hard to put into a position of influence. I haven't heard anyone complaining about Harmony manipulating Marasi's life. The sisters would probably have been kidnapped without Wax in the city, and we've seen what Marasi has already accomplished. Again, considering Sazed's life of servitude, loss, and death (including Tindwyl), I don't think it's an easy or simple process to become the champion of Harmony, but I bet it's gonna be important for Sazed to have a champion.

By my understanding, the issue with awakening stone is that you normally can't awaken something inorganic, not the issue with flexibility. As Vasher puts it, BioChroma is the power of life and seeks to follow patterns of life, which is why stone and metal are usually out. This is why Nightblood is so unusual, and took the Ninth Heightening to create. Lifeless are made from dead creatures that are for the most part in the same general shape they were in life. I think Vasher's workaround was using the skeletons as the focus for the Breaths to create Lifeless rather than the stone itself, so I'm not sure if the stone itself was awakened or not. They're odd, I'll give you that. Makes you wonder why they don't carve hardwood statues to use for awakening, even if they probably couldn't be made into Lifeless. Thunderclasts probably use some variant of surgebinding that operate on different mechanics than Breaths. Breaths change an object to act as if it were alive based on the person performing the awakening, forming the shape of musculature even when the formerly living object such as a linen cloth never had musculature. Not sure what thunderclasts use (Surge of Cohesion? If it's that, then why can't reshape amputated limbs?), but Stormlight and Voidlight definitely don't have the restrictions on inorganic material that BioChroma does.

My guess is that someone using A-Chromium won't burn away any of their personal Investiture. We've seen Leechers using the Harmonium cube despite also being Coinshots and Bloodmakers in the case of Edwarn and Telsin Ladrian, so I don't think a Returned would have any trouble using A-Chromium. I think it depends on relative power levels of Investiture and what is the "default" of burning Chromium, which we've never someone train with. I'd guess it would just generally drain Investiture around you, and would have an overall general effect that wouldn't be as powerful as if you were concentrating on Leeching something specifically. For example, just burning Brass would create a bubble of generally soothed emotions around you, but you could focus your power on a specific person or emotion. Alternately, I imagine it like how Raoden wasn't able to heal the injured Roial because he could only use general healing Aons without specifying a target. We know that Leeching can work extremely quickly, but it might be a matter of strength of Investiture being leeched and the strength of the Leecher if they aren't specifically focusing on a target. This comes back to the overall strength of the Leecher and possibly the quality/quantity/state of the target Investiture. Brandon might have a chart of comparative Investiture strengths laying around, but until Khriss figures it out we probably won't see anything like it. We do know that there are limits to normally burned Chromium, for example it doesn't destroy the innate Investiture in people, objects, or souls, which is what Nightblood can do if someone draws him without another source of Investiture. Do keep in mind that even with Nightblood, Investiture can't be destroyed. A Leecher Savant might be able to do unusual things, but we won't know until we see them. Depending on how the Cognitive Shadow was made, I could see A-Chromium dispelling them briefly before they recoalesced, like how Kaladin stabbed a spren with the Sylblade which they later confirmed didn't destroy the spren as it later reformed, or how Kelsier in Secret History could get damaged by Ruin but over time his Cognitive self regained cohesion. Kelsier sustained by Preservation and a corrupted emotion spren likely have very different levels of Investiture, so even though Kelsier could survive Ruin mangling him, I'm not sure if an emotion spren could handle a Shard's attack. Chromium could conceivably have given either Kelsier the Shade or a spren a very bad day, but I don't think it would kill them.

Well done! It is William Muns from the Rithmatist. I figure he isn't likely to be punched by Kelsier. My 5th clue was going to be "This character has most likely eaten chalk."