Duxredux

Month and a half late to the party, but I think I can think of a system that might get the result you're hoping for, though it's not really fueled by altruism. It's pretty obvious that the biggest issue with passing the entirety of the power around to whomever asks for it is that once one person decides they don't want to give it up, they are in the best possible position to keep it while the rest of the community has lost the ability to Awaken to the point that they could not easily get the Breaths back. It takes overpowering and holding someone in a specialized cell for potentially months of torture to reliably extract the power. To use a Stormlight Archive example, I was thinking about it, and I could see Siri and Susebron setting up a rental/borrow system that allowed citizens to draw from Peacegiver's Treasure with either a contract or collateral held should they try to break their agreement. Maybe not directly through Susebron himself, but perhaps through an intermediary. Considering they successfully captured Vahr while he was trying to lead a rebellion at the Fourth Heightening, it seems safe to say Hallendren has the resources to allow people to borrow a couple hundred or even maybe a thousands Breaths and make sure they gave them back at the end of the designated period. Susebron's Breaths basically could be the collateral for the entire Hallendren economy except you can really put your money to work. Sure this involves the entire community trusting someone elevated to God King, but Hallendren already did the hard part there. So long as Susebron doesn't loan out too much at a time it should be safe enough, maybe making sure he doesn't fall beneath a certain percentage of the total Breaths within Hallendren to make sure no one in the city could gather the rest outside of his control to try to make another Nightblood. Really though, I would guess most random citizens wouldn't need more than the Third Heightening, though perhaps special consideration and restrictions could be in place for anything higher. I don't really have to explain the consequences for a breach of contract when borrowing the government's Breath either, it's pretty obvious. Prior to its destruction, a lot of the manual labor you're looking for could potentially have been drawn from the army of 40,000 Lifeless rather than just leaving them to stand in the dark. We know Command phrases can be temporary, limited in scope of orders, and expire a specific timeframe, so it should be relatively simple to program the Lifeless to obey the borrower until the contract expires and then checking back in for inspection. With the provision that they could be recalled at a moments notice, they could definitely be utilized for large scale building projects or planting seasons. At the core, the idea is that if the government is the consolidation and direction of power, then hopefully you can trust your government. None of these are perfect, and a system of checks and balances would need to be divised if there came a God King that did not intend to be as just as Susebron, but this might work for quite some time for Hallendren.

Well... we're talking semi-autonomous. That probably rules out metalminds in the same way I wouldn't consider the random beads of Lerasium left in those pots to be avatars. For clarification, let's pull up the Coppermind section. I'll note that I disagree with the statement that Avatars are considered to be Shards in their own right based on that WoB. Otherwise I would lean towards a defintion of an Avatar as a persona, even if not a particularly self aware one, not just a lump of Investiture split off. I could see the Mists in Era 1 operating like an Avatar, maybe. Of the basic powers, I would guess Type III BioChromatic objects would be the closest analog to an Avatar as the Awakener splits off a portion of their soul to do a task independent of themself with the ability to draw it back on Command. Metalminds in contrast simply seem to be Investiture Identity locked in a not dissimilar way that some Investitures are keyed to the related Shard.

Thanks for asking interesting questions! Hooboy. Philosophy time. Let's look at what has been said about Hemalurgy and Ruin. I can't help thinking that despite Ruin as a universal constant and a fundamental component of nature, Hemalurgy seems anything but natural. I can get where you see Ruin in nature, predators eating prey and taking the nutrients into themselves. Erosion and decay of the deceased as a necessary foundation for regrowth as larger complex structures are broken down and then consumed by lower level organisms. This is a primary component of how various elements like carbon cycle through an ecosystem. One of the main concepts at the end of both Era 1 and Era 2 is coming to peace with such things, as Sazed picks up Ruin in addition to Preservation and Wax storms the Set tower to stop Telsin. Accepting Ruin as a natural way of things, that it's okay if things change and come to an end, that seems like it can lead to healthier views on life. How does Hemalurgy fit in? Hemalurgy fits the predation cycle, where the valuable attributes in the weak(er) or dying are consumed by the young or strong, yet that piece of soul is locked out of the rest of the cycle. It doesn't just follow patterns of life as it gets incorporated into the body and being, but the spike must be implanted into another soul, twisting and rerouting the body in the process. In most cases, once something dies, the physical, cognitive, and spiritual separate in their directions, yet with Hemalurgy that piece of soul is trapped for as long as the spike holds charge, just barely self-aware enough that it can be tricked into thinking it is still in a body so long as you keep it in a vat of blood. Should the spike lose its charge completely, Brandon has confirmed that piece of soul does indeed move to the Beyond. Presumably this means that a Hemalurgic spike loses its charge as the fragment of soul is pulled toward The Beyond, fighting the metal anchoring it to the Physical realm. This is more than a little disturbing, even if the only thing that you are doing is trying to excise a part of your own soul that you do not desire. That said, this is only half of what constitutes the art of Hemalurgy, which Brandon has divided into two distinct steps. Step one is the harvesting of a portion of a spiritweb into receptacle, the second is implanting an Invested spike into a Spiritweb. What we have seen in Era 1 and most of Era 2, is that getting what you want is greatly simplified if you use a known portion of soul as the Investiture for granting the powers. What I suspect we're learning from the Set experiments in TLM, with Moonlight's note that harvesting general Invested allowed them to briefly gain powers, is that any Investiture within the spike can be used to grant powers - the huge catch that they don't have a method to program the Investiture to do what you want it to. Existing soul fragments will just try to do what they used to do in their original soul, figuring out how to recreate that piece of soul is a non trivial issue. Actually... from what your describe for hopes for late stage Hemalurgy, you're basically talking about Moonlight's final stamp that apparently they were uncertain would wear off. General Cosmere spoilers: I suspect that late era will see much more ethical applications of coded Invested spikes that were not sourced from souls. Hemalurgy can create Connections never devised by the Shards and could potentially bring together planets and peoples from across the Cosmere. Medallion tech in general will be safer, particularly for things like Connection as we have already seen repeatedly used for language. One of Hemalurgy's main advantages is the permanence of it as it removes the soul's native ability to resist the change, allowing Kandra, Marsh, and Kel to benefit from their blessings for centuries. The darker side is of course harvesting souls for things that you can't fake or replicate. Connections that cannot be fooled, changes to a soul that can't come by any other way. General Cosmere spoilers: Yes, Hemalurgy warps the body and soul, but some conditions are congenital, and the soul's template may cause death. Take Professor Irich of the Set who presumably could not be healed even with unkeyed Feruchemical Health. It may not be that different from my friend who was born with congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD) who could not develop his muscles at all. Exercise simply hurt without building them back. He eventually needed metal rods fusing his spine and hips to keep him sitting up straight in his motorized wheelchair so that he did not lean over and collapse his lungs. Sometimes nature's healing (and presumably most Cosmere healing) can't fix it, so we do the best we can. For some people, being handed Allomantic Pewter for the first time without growing up with it, and it could break them, physically or egotistically, for some it may let them more or less live normally for once. This degree of remolding of the self is not that different from the ethics of plastic surgery (with one major caveat). I don't think very many people would begrudge a major burn victim or child born with a cleft lip from utilizing plastic surgery, but I expect there are some people turn to plastic surgery as a way to improve their self image and are never satisified with the results (while others probably take to it like a Kandra). All surgeries pretty much have to cut into the body and give it a chance to heal, we've just developed less intrusive ways of going about it. Is it natural to slice a person apart with a scalpel, peel back the rib cage, and install a pace maker before sewing them back together? Not particularly, but I'm okay with it. Less okay if someone wanted elective surgery for a second liver so that they could win drinking contests while others were on a waiting list. That major caveat I mentioned though? I think there will always be a potential cost even if it is centuries later. If they figure out donorless elective seemingly ethical Hemalurgy for this kind of modification, it may be several generations before those Brandon's WoBs about Inquisitor children start becoming manifest. Spikes warp the body and soul, down to the DNA, and those heritable changes made the Inquisitors no longer Homo sapiens despite being able to breed with humans. He waffled on whether or not their children were more likely to be metalborn, but he did say that there could be complications. Those changes to the DNA and soul may not be fully traceable or understood by Scadrians for a very long time, and it may take Shardic intervention to reduce those complications as it did with the Koloss that were altered to breed true. It seems quite likely that we skipped over some really horrendous possibilities when the Koloss jumped straight from "designed sterile so they would die off" to "designed to breed true without complications". Circling back, these changes are exactly what you want those rat experiments for, but it seems plausible that with Moonlight's insights and stolen notes, they might figure out elective Hemalurgy before they figure out DNA. In conclusion, rewriting the soul this directly in my opinion should never be done lightly or on a whim, but I won't write out some positive use cases with minimized (not eliminated) harm from Hemalurgy. Aluminum will mitigate the Flaw, donors may not be necessary for general operations, and they may be able to find the spike size thresholds to maximize benefit while minimizing the extent the body needs to warp around the spike. As for the alterations to the DNA... it's hard to say what would be better or what should be done for congenital defects and diseases, because those severe medical issues are already heritable, the spikes just add another layer of complication. As a hopefully related aside for something I brushed on while poking around for this topic, I learned that stem cell research to grow replacement organs and tissues to supplement or replace the organ donation model, the stem cell grown organ may introduce a secondary set of DNA into the recipient. IRL there really is a thing called human chimerism where a person can have multiple DNA genotypes within their body which historically complicated a paternity test. I've barely scratched the surface there, so don't equate these operations with Hemalurgy, but the ethics of long term Hemalurgy are closer to the ethics of IRL medical advancements than you might think as we look at stem cell research and genetic modification. WoBs: Aluminum helping resist the Flaw Complications to Inquisitor children Inquisitors no longer Homo sapiens One caveat, this 2019 WoB Brandon says he's never been asked about Inquisitor children and that the spikes would not make them more likely to inherit the Metallic Arts genes, so... not sure where he's ended on this. I could believe that for the earlierWoB he might be thinking of genetic complications, for the later he might have been trying to make sure that Inquisitors with Feruchemy spikes could not have given birth to a Twinborn compounder in Era 1. Not sure. Souls released from a Hemalurgic spike move to the Beyond

This is probably what you're looking for. Your instincts that it doesn't seem to always follow Newtonian physics is correct, but this is much better explained in the above thread.

Interesting... I have another significant direction that I think would be well worth exploring for this topic. What did Kel and Spook have that enabled them to make advancements in a matter of a few decades or centuries that was beyond the trial and error of the Steel Inquisitor laboratories? That said, TLR had good reason to not let any Inquisitor get too powerful lest they challenge him, so maybe some directions were curbed. Let's look at what they had going for them. The obvious start is that Kelsier held Preservation and gained generalized insights into how Hemalurgy worked, starting from learning how Koloss were constructed. As a Cognitive Shadow, Kelsier could see the souls of people and hear their thoughts, and vitally see on the soul itself the placement of any spikes - including any changes visible during placement on the CR. I do wonder if Kel's insight that souls and metal are the same thing directly relates to Hemalurgy. Next, I'm assuming they got permission or assistance from Marsh who would have been an incredibly useful reference for spike placement, material, and the knowledge that burning Atium lets you get the placement right. Early on while Marsh was young and didn't need to Compound age, they might have done just that. Not least, Marsh had performed several Hemalurgic operations under Ruin's control who had a far greater understanding than probably even TLR. This would let them get a head start on transferring Feruchemical powers. Between Spook's Tin enhanced eyes, Marsh's Inquisitor sight and expertise with Bronze, and Kelsier's view from the Cognitive as a Sliver of Preservation, that's a dream team for drawing insights from Hemalurgy. Assuming of course we're excluding Kelsier's contacts with two of the best scholars we know, Sazed and Khriss. I do think Inquisitor sight and someone in the Cognitive also giving input on what each change did to the subject would be indispensable, particularly with the tech level they were starting at. As I'll describe later, I think their senses viewing a broad range of what was happening to the subject may have been a key factor to their discoveries. As for your current ideas for rat testing, there's some obvious limitations as it would be difficult to identify and isolate changes from anything outside of the physical attribute sector. Identity, memories, Connection, Invested powers, intelligence and more seem hard to test with rats. You might get some data by controlling them with the Flaw and putting them through tests but unfortunately some of the most useful Hemalurgic functions could really only be identified when performed on a sapient being. I don't see how rat tests would let you figure out how to steal Twinsoul's bond to Silajana even temporarily or Moonlight's transformed state. This unfortunately points towards Kel's idea of using criminals as Hemalurgic test subjects, which seems to have enormous potential to backfire as a comic book supervillain origin story. In the end, I suspect what will be the biggest advancement in Hemalurgy is not the study of Hemalurgy but a study of Spiritwebs. Developing technology or abilities to see the anatomy of the soul will let you know what you are actually interacting with and what the Bindpoints map to. What we have seen up to this point seems more like science fiction horror from an era with only a vague understanding of anatomy, when lobotomies, amputation without anesthetic, blood letting, or trying to balance the internal humors were as much as we knew. Koloss and Inquisitors resemble the cultural iconic Frankenstein's monster not just little. Future Hemalurgy hopefully will resemble that monster as much as modern organ donations, transplants, brain surgery, and reconstructive operations resemble medieval surgery. Scadrial needs to learn more about the soul, not just blindly punch out pieces and cobble them together, counting on good Fortune to make it work. Now Hemalurgy can and will help with this in the same way that historically people who have survived being shot or impaled in the head have been tremendously useful for understanding the anatomy of the brain. This includes figuring out why the heart seems to be a universal donor point and why Metalborn power transfer Bindpoints function as they do. They are developing machines capable of using the Metallic Arts. I'd start looking at A-Steel, A-Bronze, or F-Duralumin in a finely controlled aluminum enclosed environment used to make something like an X-ray or MRI of the Spiritweb. That is a place that rats will probably be the first subjects. They are learning about spectroscopy and how different Investitures interact with each other. The biggest advancement might not come from someone studying Hemalurgy at all.

Let's add in a few more notes from the Coppermind article on Mist. Yes, an Allomancer that can draw on the Mists can indeed extend their metal burns, but also their burns become enhanced. An example is Vin Pulling on TLR's bracers with an enhanced Ironpull while drawing on the Mists. I suspect the usual method of utilizing the metal as a catalyst to draw power from Preservation is gated by that catalytic consumption rate - and is generally restricted to safe levels unless constantly flaring and risking Savantism. Chugging Dor or Breathing Mist likely bypass that limitation, possibly at a level dangerous to the practitioner. Presumably another value that raw unkeyed Investiture provides is more for Feruchemists, considering the nature of Compounding. The whole reason Compounding was useful is that it bypassed the storage limitation and allowed them to directly generate the stored attribute with Preservation's power. By the end of Era 2, the Basin hadn't figured out how to Compound except by a natural Twinborn Compounder like Miles due to Identity contamination from Hemalurgy. I'm sure there would be a couple steps, but it would be distinctly useful to have raw Investiture that could be converted to a resource on an as needed basis. During space age, being able to choose to power FTL or oxygenation is handy. Another reason includes relatively safe power sources for technology designed to be fueled by raw Investiture. For obvious reasons, Moonlight's stunt of downing a jar of Dor to boost her stamps would have ended very poorly had she tried to eat ettmetal to get the same effect. Stormlight also is much more stable albeit with a shorter shelf life compared to ettmetal. At the end though, the Scadrian group currently pushing for off-world Investiture is the Ghostbloods, who have access to considerably more Invested Arts and technology than the typical Misting. Raw power to fuel Kel's organization will ostensibly help him protect Scadrial from foreign powers and further Scadrial's (his) interests.

How big can a soul get? From the Coppermind: The spiritweb is the network of Connections and Investiture which make up the soul of a creature, place, object, or planet.[2] Residing in the Spiritual Realm, spiritwebs lack any tangible shape or size, with their borders defined by their Identity. Identity hacking is tough, but we have seen things similar to what you describe. Absorbing souls and creating a hive mind with those with compromised Identities is basically what the Cinder King did. What the Father Machine on Komashi did. From a certain standpoint Kalad's Phantoms are souls bonded to golem. Whether the specific powers you describe can do it, that's probably a RAFO, but we have seen things similar to what you are asking.

No idea on the details. Again, because the Blade is automatically dismissed as soon as it leaves the Shardbearer's hand, it would very, very rarely even be in a position to be damaged. I would expect the usual outcome would be the hand or arm holding the Blade to be destroyed or damaged resulting in a dropped and dismissed Blade rather than a successful hit on the gem. A broken gem preventing dismissal has happened through presumably "normal" combat (very loosely normal) off camera when Dalinar was ambushed by Rathalas soldiers. After the ambush, he had to carry Oathbringer back to camp with him because the cracked stone interfered with the process (Oathbringer ch 75). Polestone durability is also not a consistent quality as some gems are brittle enough to crack when dropped while others can handle more abuse. Really though, what we're talking about here is a Plate-assisted throw to get any range at all, which means a lot of force. Get the rotation wrong or have the Blade impact with anything other the cutting edge and it will bounce around. If this is combat, it will be bouncing around among fortifications, armor, weaponry, and generally hard stuff meant to take a beating. The exception might be if you're tossing your Blade at squishy unarmored opponents who are relying on evasion or boosted healing to survive, at which point the backstop begins to matter. Now it might not happen all that frequently, but even if it's 1 in 100 throws or even 1 in 1000 that has it land wrong, it still isn't what you would want as your primary form of combat. Especially as the premise was figuring out how to spam thrown Shardblades. If you really want to spam them, find a living Spren.

If you're equipped with Plate, an obvious response is to hurl the Blade and just jump/run after it to start punching the defenses after the panic and disarray a thrown Shardblade would cause. If you have a second Blade or any other weapon including fallen armored enemies, use those as well. Pick up the Blade, repeat. If someone survives and picks it up, dismiss it right before they try swinging it at you before punching their face in. You'd have to maintain momentum, but this seems like a pretty direct strategy that would work well for the Blackthorn. In general though, as I look into it, using a Dead Shardblade is risky. If the gemstone is removed or damaged, it no longer can be summoned or dismissed. If you're relying on summoning it for retrieval, a misaligned hit or a rotation to strike with the pommel might make it irretrievable, particularly against a prepared enemy. Having the Blade dismiss if it leaves your hand is one of the better ways to not have the gemstone damaged. Of course if you have a living Blade, both the solution and the problem are moot anyway.

I could be wrong, but the OP idea seems several orders of magnitude harder than what Kelsier pulled off in his fight against the Inquisitor for the simple reason that Kelsier only used this spinning technique as a defensive barrier, not as a mobile weapon. He made a cloud of objects to pummel Bendal, but didn't try that spinning trick again. Even if he did, I expect it to be much harder to pull off with a Shardblade. For starters, the Shardblade will block Steel and Iron lines as easily as trying the same stunt with an Aluminum greatsword. The Blade may even sever those lines as they appear in the Spiritual Realm, whatever that means (WoB below). I assume Kel's stunt was something along the lines of throw a pole out with a vertical orientation, Push hard on one end at same time Pull on the other to get it spinning without horizontal displacement. Once spinning, then Push/Pull on the center of mass which would be the natural pivot point to move them into position without disrupting the spin. I suspect this is something that would be substantially harder with a Shardblade as you would need to deliberately target metal mounted at the pivot point rather than simply not concentrating on the ends, even if it accommodated metal studs at key points. WoB: Kel's random metal poles are easier for the stunt as well as they have a uniform shape and generally uniform distribution of mass. The aerodynamics of both ends will be fairly similar and the axis of rotation will be in the center. A Shardblade might have unusual ornamentation, artistic shapes, odd curves, asymmetric mass distribution, off-center center of mass and pivot point, and in general will have much, much different aerodynamic characteristics between the blade and the handle. I expect it to be much harder to get it into a stable spin, period, compared to a random pole from a cage. If you want a 6 foot long greatsword to resemble a buzzsaw, it would have to be spinning ridiculously fast, and you would need to be constantly moving above or below it to help it maintain lift as it moves. We do see Wax put up a constant directional Push even without a valid anchor in the direction to preemptively deflect gunfire, but a bullet Pushed orthogonally is a different matter from intermittently having the weight of a Shardblade be a valid anchor as the metal clips swing in and out from behind the body of the Shardblade repeatedly jarring you. I'm fine if someone sees this differently but I'm imagining this blade spinning in the same axis as the cutting edge, the obvious direction for this stunt. From that orientation the metal anchor points constantly visible would only be what protrudes past the profile of the weapon, which as others have noticed may interfere with the cutting action of the blade. From any position not perfectly in line with the plane of rotation, I'm not seeing a way to impart any more rotational speed on the ends without it twisting and wobbling violently, nor can I think of a simple way to smoothly change the plane of rotation once established. If this is done with a dead Blade, you would have to be very skilled to have this spinning Blade in the air for longer than a couple seconds to offset the 10 second summon cool down while you are in close proximity to whirling death. I think it could be done with years, decades, or centuries of practice, but to me it sounds hard, particularly if you care at all about collateral damage. As for this: I can think of three reasons. First, it has to be an exceptionally full Metalmind to no longer be sensed as we see in some of Wax's investigations in Era 2. We see him casually him Pushing Wayne onto a roof in AoL by his Goldminds. He could still sense that incredibly full unkeyed Goldmind they recovered from Lady Kelesina in BoM, albeit fairly, with the Bands themselves the only Metalmind not piercing someone he completely failed to identify as a Metalmind. Marsh failed to distinguish the bag holding Sazed's rings from a bag of clips and Pushes them into Sazed, who heals with the Goldmind embedded in his gut. Second, metal piercings couldn't be Pushed or Pulled on except by the most powerful, so the Terris cultural piercings would have flown entirely under the radar. This is one reason Wax in later years had surgery done to make his Ironminds into piercings. Third reason is that in Era 1, noble fashion often had jewelry that was painted wood to look like metal as a safer mimicry of TLR's own style. There was a ready-made alibi that the Terris stewards who had jewelry that couldn't be pushed simply were wearing painted wood as both a safety precaution and a way to make their house appear wealthier than they were.

Hum... I'm going to be making some assumptions here. Assumption 1 is that there is a distinct mechanism that allows a Sleepless to think, communicate, and coordinate with all of the individuals within the horde. Hordelings can spread across a sizeable percentage of a planet if I recall, which is beyond the range and scope of most of the basic applications of Invested Arts we've seen. From this my guess is that the Sleepless function similar to one of the entities from Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series (the specific name is a spoiler) in that it basically is a distributed brain that uses Connection instead of conventional synapses to think and coordinate its distributed body. On a related note, assumption 2 is that as the individual hordelings die or otherwise become disConnected from the other hordelings the Sleepless as a whole loses intelligence and whatever memories or skills stored within the tiny mind and brain of the individual hordeling. There will be redundancy of course, but this is killing the mind of the Sleepless which will need to reproduce to build up a buffer. As for trying to kill a Sleepless, it would be super costly and it would be difficult to know if you had truly succeeded considering they can swim, fly, (probably)burrow, and imitate the local animals. The larger hordeling, up to house-sized, presumably are much rarer and take much longer to grow and develop than the smaller ones, and likely as a result will not have evolutionary adaptations seen in the younger hordelings. Small ones can be exterminated using similar principles to killing insects or small rodents. Small bodies are susceptible to heat as they have a high surface-area to volume ratio. Poisons and oxygen deprivation will similarly kill small insects and animals faster and more effectively because they generally have accelerated metabolism rates that burn through their intake rapidly. A Dustbringer cutting a flaming wall, Soulcaster creating a wall of pitch, or perhaps vacuums created by Windrunners or Skybreakers could work, but it would need to be done on a massive scale even just to defend. If we find anything that could disrupt or directly attack a Sleepless through the Connection between the hordelings, that would probably be the most effective. As an aside, let's look at Surgebinding. My assumption is that the Stormlight a small individual hordeling can hold is pretty minimal so a seemingly innocuous cremling will not be able to do any major Surgebinding. It would take greater mass and greater storage for anything significant. Considering it seems that at least early Ideal Radiants cannot be too far separated from their spren without negative effects, I suspect distant hordelings would not have access to the Surges. Not sure what proximity to the spren's location they would need, maybe a bit further than the range squires can be powered by Radiants would make sense.

I picked up Elantris from my library - because there weren't any other books out. I had friends who were reading Wheel of Time and also got into Elantris and Mistborn so it was something to chat about during lunches. I enjoyed Raoden's optimism and as I read Brandon's books with characters with people for the most part trying to do and be good people (and often failing along the way), I decided to stick with his books during a time I was trying to model my life after people or behaviors that I thought were good to emulate. This was long before he became the phenomenon he is today, back when it was just pockets of people who found his early works, liked them, and shared them with friends and family. Even with my teenage years long behind me, I still find myself trying to model good people and those trying to better themselves in a variety of circumstances, which is a consistent reason that I pick up the Cosmere. I only have vague memories of when I joined 17th Shard, because there was a significant gap between when I made my account and when I became consistently active. It might have been looking up a question or stumbling across the Coppermind, it might have been listening to Shardcast during my time as an early morning janitor looking for a huge volume of audio books, podcasts, and music when I had 30-40 hours a week of solo manual labor. It was after a friend brought me with him to a local Oathbringer signing with the Q&A and I learned that WoBs were a thing. I think there was a scene with the Allomantic grenades in BoM that seemed to not mesh with what I expected to happen, and I wanted to see if anyone had an explanation for it, along with some other theories that have been forming in my mind. I became fully active during the pandemic when everything shut down and my whole region went into full isolation and 17th Shard became one of my primary forms of socialization which coincided nicely with listening to the whole Cosmere on audiobook while cleaning and disinfecting. Duxredux has been my username ever since I think way back when I used to play Maple Story with my older brothers. They came up with distinct and somewhat goofy names in a <word><word> format for the multiple characters allowed per profile which I won't mention here because they still use them. While reading the dictionary, as one does, my copy defined "redux" as to be repeated or something similar, so I basically chose "duck, again, duck" or Duxredux. The phonetic symmetry appealed to me and it seemed the right level of dorky to me. A few years later a friend looked at that name and had assumed that it shortened latin, duxe, redux, or "deduction and reduction" as a nod to my logical analysis. That still seemed to fit me, so I kept it. Most recently I was trying to find the specific roots for that and felt lazy and asked ChatGPT what duxredux might mean. Apparently "dux" was a term for a Roman general and redux also means a revival or something reborn, so apparently my name also could have been interpreted as "general/commander/leader reborn". My username has had three different meanings without my having changed it at all.

At least initially, the Sapphire sea, but mostly because I'm not accustomed to the dangers of the Aether spores. Zephyr spores seem the least likely to get me killed as I get accustomed to how to respond if my eyes start watering, how much exertion will make me sweat dangerously, and how many layers of clothes to wear for the same reason. I have no doubt that inhaling one could be extremely unpleasant, but it's still less likely to kill me than having a chunk of Roseite sprout in my nostril and sinuses. In other words, I have not grown up with common sense for Lumar. If I have to visit a spore sea, I'll choose one that I'm the most likely to survive. Besides which, I have the best idea on how to harness portable compressed air to develop electrical infrastructure, alternative version of an internal combustion engine, and extensive applications of pneumatics. A tremendous amount of portable energy is in the spores, and Zephyr spores leave the least residue so to say. That said... I have to wonder what rainfall looks like on the Zephyr. I would assuming it would cause constant explosions flinging the spores in all directions with ridiculous winds. I'm actually a bit shocked that it is the Crimson sea, not the Sapphire, that has unpredictable meteorlogical patterns, as I can only guess what rain passing through will do to the barometric pressure. Since it is predictable, it still seems relatively safe.

So a couple things of interesting things to chip in to this conversation. First, the size of the metal and the Investiture storage does not scale like you might expect. The relationship is not linear, it's kind of like there are size classes for the storage. Second, it's worth noting that Hemalurgy has two distinct process that can be used together or separately. The first is harvesting a portion of a Spiritweb using a spike. The second is implanting an Invested spike into a recipient, hotwiring it into their Spiritweb. For example, if you take any Invested spike and stick it into a Kandra, it will still function as a Hemalurgic spike, piercing into the Spiritual Realm presumably bridging their Cognitive block. Next question, @The Shattered Cosmere could I get a citation for where it says Kelsier's spike is made out of steel? The only place I can find that is on the Hemalurgy table for the right orbit and as far as I can tell it's conflating the location of the spike with the material. I looked up the the cited chapter (TLM 40), and I can't find a specified material for the spike mentioned anywhere. Because of that, I'm still not sure on the material of the spike, nor if it even is Invested by the usual Hemalurgic process. The implanting of the spike, so long as it is Invested, should still anchor Kelsier's soul to the new body, but the question of he's tacked on like a sheet of paper to a piece of cardboard or if the spike itself holds the entirety of his Cognitive Shadow still seems uncertain. I wouldn't put it past Kelsier to put in a fail safe so that if the rest of his body gets obliterated but the spike survives, just drop it onto another Mistwraith and he's back at it. That said, Cosmere spoilers I think it's pretty much pure speculation though, if the spike were removed if the Cognitive Shadow would just pop off and be able to run away, if he would still be anchored to the spike, or what. I'm guessing that even if the spike were removed he could still regain a borrowed body via Hemalurgy, that it wouldn't kill him outright, but no idea on any other complications.

Feruchemy was diluted because all full Feruchemists were hunted down and killed by Steel Inquisitors other than Sazed who Ascended. The genotype was there but not the phenotype. Any Feruchemist is rare after the Catacendre, particularly as this is the second time in a thousand years that all living Feruchemists were culled. Beyond that, the interbreeding between Allomancers and Feruchemists somehow disrupted the Feruchemy sDNA and broke it unto the individual powers. Presumably this was a reason for the Terris isolationist policy.

Anyone else finish The Hero of Ages and then go back and read the epigraph of the prologue of Mistborn: The Final Empire? I can't be the first person to notice this, but I think it's cool and worth acknowledging.

I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule, but if the question is likely to have a definitive answer then I would put it in the Q&A. The voting component of the Q&A will put the highest voted answer at the top and pull it completely out of the chronological context. If the question is speculative or likely to evoke discussion then I would put it in the discussion board where the back and forth dialogue makes sense. Lastly, since the Q&A board is full Cosmere and the responses are full Cosmere, a questioner trying to avoid spoilers might put the question in a series specific discussion board, though if posting in the Q&A they could include that they don't want spoilers outside of the book. This one? I would probably put it in the Q&A, but that might just be me. Since you asked for a step-by-step breakdown, here it is. Customer buys 3 large pouches of potatos at 8 clips a pouch. Presumably pays the exact amount of 24 clips with a 20 and four 1s (see below). (24-24=0) Wayne asks for 20 in change and hands the bill over. (-20) Man gives two 5s and ten 1s. (-20+5+5+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=0) Wayne says he has plenty of 1s, and asks for another 10. Hands 7 in coins over and takes the 10 (0+10-7=3) Old Dent tells Wayne they have change in a box. Wayne asks for the 20 back and counts out 13 in exchange. (3+20-13=10) Wayne offers to trade for the man's eelskin wallet for a flower and the "accidental" extra 10. (10-10=0) So yes, as others have concluded, if you ignore that Wayne tricked the guy into trading his wallet for a random flower, Old Dent's math that Wayne shortchanged the customer tracks out. Since the math gets us a net 0, presumably the man paid the exact amount for the 8 pouches of potatos totaling at 24 since we don't see a 1 or 6 in the 1s digit for change. Really, the tricky part is figuring out where Old Dent gets the 50 and 40 from, since Wayne got the guy to hand over I think 54 clips for a 24 clip purchase and gave back 20 in change before offering to trade 10 and flower for the wallet.

For these kinds of rankings it's also worth noting thay they are relative. The phenomenon of hype and inflated expectations often means that for simple good solid stories it can feel underwhelming. The authors I tend to gravitate back towards when I want to reread something are Sanderson, Timothy Zahn, and Terry Pratchett, and for me even Pratchett's early works before he hit his stride, bottom ranked among his dozens of books still will get more laughs from me than the best from many other authors. It's like mocking the 10th place Olympic athlete for being lazy or having sloppy technique. Sure they weren't the best, but they were still competing on the global level. That said, I feel you on these giant tomes that Brandon makes, and I'm still having trouble focusing on Wind and Truth. The thing is, what Brandon generally is superb at is the climax. Without the build up and establishing the beats for the characters, the climaxes will feel half-baked, and it almost certainly will not improve a less-than-favorite book experience. Basically don't do what I did as an impatient teenager reading Hero of Ages and skim to the point that I was ½ to ¾ of the way through the book before I realized who the actual villain was or core mechanics of the magic system that the plot was hinged on.

My vote is Hoid. Vin is not particularly attached to immortality and perfectly content to go to The Beyond. She doesn't have huge far reaching objectives that require immortality either. Hoid can worldhop and hide just about anywhere in the Cosmere for a century or two, maybe more depending on if Vin has Ascended and she's hunting for him. Hoid has objectives and will see them through even if it means persisting for millennia, orchestrating the fall of Shards and watching worlds burn. Vin doesn't particularly want to participate in things like that, and is content to die and move on. If both decided the other needed to go down, I expect Hoid to succeed in engineering Vin's demise even if she held Preservation before she figured out how to permanently off him. Hoid has outlived at least 7 of the original 16 Shards which says a lot considering how many of them would like to swat him.

A-Pewter's powerset will probably appeal to a larger group of the population. Physical fitness, enhanced balance, expedited healing, increased durability, and being able to operate at peak capacity for hours if necessary would be useful for just about any profession or life style I can think of. Construction worker or athlete are the obvious professions, but Pewter enhances or supports most daily acts of life. Sure, a computer programmer might need to get a specially reinforced keyboard, but forced wakefulness and having pewter to offset a sedentary career is distinctly beneficial. I would expect Tin to be more useful for careers and lifestyles that are detail oriented. Someone who enjoys going on a nature hike, not for the fresh air and exercise, but for the beauty of nature and wildlife. A chef being able identify prime ingredients and distinctions in flavor. A psychologist being able to identify body language cues in their subject. Safety inspector being able to see details, smell corrosion or mold, or hear pests. Carpenter making precision cuts and detail work. A violinist would hear the tones much more loudly and distinctly, as well as how much the string is cutting into their finger. In general though, Tin would require more training to be directly useful, equipment if trying to isolate a single sense, and more. It's far more of a case-by-case basis. Even then, each of these professions could probably still find a benefit in Pewter as it enhances grace, dexterity, and endurance. There are plenty of professions that would become distinctly unpleasant when burning Tin with more sporadic direct benefits. Me personally, I already have found plenty of upsides to being hyposensitive, lower adversion to pain, being able to take of my glasses and go basically blind on demand, and not getting nauseated when dealing with smelly tasks. In general I'm doing just fine with weakened senses. Pewter has far more application in my life, that there runs a serious risk of developing a dependency or savantism.

Nice, that looks like usable numbers. What this isn't accounting for is the added weight from the Plate which adds a lot of necessary force. Dead Shardplate suits can weigh over 100 stoneweights, which if this is the translated IRL modern stone, is over 1400 lbs. Add approximately 250 lbs for Dalinar as a tall and powerfully built Alethi. As noted,the Rosharan inch is 0.92 of a standard inch, and the local gravity is 0.7 Cosmere standard. Converting 8 Rosharan feet to metric gives us 8 x 12 x 0.92 x 0.0254 = 2.243 m for the jump height. 748.427 kg for mass, and 6.86 m/s² for local gravity. Internet says an athlete jumping from a squat takes about 0.2 seconds. Kinematics for that would be... vf² = vi ²+ 2ad. 0 = vi² - (2*6.86*2.243), vi = 5.55 m/s I think. a = v/t = 5.55/0.2 = 27.75 m/s² F=ma would be F =(748.43*27.75) = about 20,768 newtons, but that's just the force for the jump, not including overcoming gravity. For that, we would add (748.43*6.86), or 5,134 newtons. So... my ballpark is 25,900 newtons of force on average for Dalinar's 8 foot vertical jump. Does that check out? I expect it to be a tremendous amount of force for something as heavy as a suit of Shardplate to jump that high.

There's a lot of ranges in this question, which may be why no one has touched this one. The speed of the bullet is determined by the mass of bullet, length of the gun barrel, type of gun powder, amount of gun powder, and faster modern rounds can be 3 times faster than the slowest. Probably one of the better scenarios we have for this is Wax Pushing on bullets to give them enough force to punch through oak tables and kill the bandit using it for cover. In the scene after Wax increases his weight and Pushes with as much force as he can, the bullet "cracks" in the air, so presumably it broke mach 1 or 1125 fps (feet per second). Allomantically Pushing I don't think will be a straight multiplicative increase in speed, but probably not boost faster rounds as much since there is less time to apply force. That said, I am not great at these kinds of physics questions, so I asked ChatGPT. https://chatgpt.com/share/67b0e56d-4c60-8010-9436-33a914812871 Summary, the bullet would probably have to be traveling at least 1300-1500 fps to penetrate a 1 inch oak table and hit a target with lethal force. Old West guns had bullet velocity anywhere from 850 fps to 1200 fps, so who knows how much speed Wax added. I defer to @StormingTexan and @DrPhysics as those who know more about firearms and this kind of calculation (respectively) than me. At least you may be able to say how far off ChatGPT was.

I agree that being raised in a culture that believes a Divine Breath heals anything probably would let the Returned heal any issue for a local. I mean, Susebron's father reportedly healed a city, though we know this was misinformation. Enabling Susebron to speak is far more than simply aligning the physical with the Spiritual template, we know that Cosmere healing can That said, Brandon certainly gave himself enough wiggle room in that last WoB @Treamayne, to make the circumstances a non-Nalthian needs to Return complicated and unlikely. Possibly they need to be carrying Breath, since a Drab can't return. Actually, found a WoB that outright states a non-native can't Return, so I suspect they need Breaths sufficiently Connecting them to Nalthis and maybe more. As for the OP and how a fragment of a Divine Breath ended up in a human lineage, I found an interesting WoB I wonder if it's relevant. See bolded: What is different about artists in the world of Warbreaker? They have Breath, often the Third Heightening for offerings to the Returned. We also learn from Vasher helping Nanrovah's daughter modify her own memory that partial Breath utilization is possible even if the majority believe otherwise. If artists can pare off a sliver of their soul, why not the Reutrned? Moving on, it is worth noting that Treledees did not intend for Susebron to die as he passed on Peacegiver's Treasure and furthermore they hoped that Susebron and Siri would have their own child who would become the next God King (see WoB below). Susebron had been told that they would have a child and believed it. Considering Susebron's priests knew the mechanics of mental Commands, it wouldn't surprise me if this was related and that it's simply a Command. That said, the mechanism between Vo's children and the God Kings may be different. Actually... TSM spoilers:

I dunno, @Treamayne, this might fall under forum games as a legitimate reason to revive an old post. While this is certainly an old thread and you are absolutely right that it's unlikely that the creator will pop on just to look at the quiz they made years ago, to me it doesn't fit a lot of the criteria for threads that get closed. This thread is specifically about Era 1 characters so the thread won't be full of incorrect speculation, it's for fun, and unlike most, it won't become outdated as more canon is released. The link and the quiz still work. I think that it wouldn't cause any problems for people to go and take this quiz again and post about what character they got. Archiving this means that odds are no one will find this quiz, and the #1 Cosmere fan forum is pretty much where I would expect to find these things. That said, I would heavily discourage tagging anyone from a post over a year ago unless you know them and know they are still active, like maybe if you were buddies with AonEne and had to laugh about their result as TLR.

At what point in time in their careers? When they were contemporaries or at the height of their power? Preservation vs spiked Mistborn with access to Atium and Duralumin? Another way of looking at this is asking if Zane is stronger than an Inquisitor? If not, then Kelsier > Inquisitor > Zane though of course rock, paper, scissors formats are a thing. Since they never actually meet, we have to do indirect comparisons, like how well they fight against Vin. It is worth noting that with all of the shenanigans that Kelsier pulled on Keep Venture, acting as an informant to Straff, observing Vin at the balls, and stealing a safe full of Atium out of Keep Venture, Zane as the house Mistborn never once caught Kelsier in the act. Other than Steelpushes, I would say that Kelsier is more capable in nearly every other category you could compare them. Ability to survive/immortality, cleverness, sneakiness, charisma, willingness to commit to insane gambits, access to raw Investiture, financially, administrative ability, paranoia, disregard for authority, Cosmere awareness, leading and inspiring, theologically, running cons, and more. Kelsier has proven himself at a high level in all of these categories. Zane's resume doesn't come anywhere close, though he did trick Vin a few times (which may not have been all him, with both of them spiked and influenced by Ruin).