Duxredux

Closest thing we've seen to voting into power via Breath is Vahr, and we saw how the enemy state responded - capture, torture, and extract the Breaths. Directly elevating your leaders in this way is risky for a host of reasons, as noted, least of which is the leader abandoning responsibility and running off to enjoy the rest of their extended life in wealth. Unlike other elected positions where they are empowered by the people voting and pledging that they will obey and trust the directives of the leader, Breaths are very hard to extract if the leader is impeached. Doing so for your own country ultimately results in a huge net-loss while there is a huge gain for a foreign power to attempt an abduction. There are also only a handful of things that absolutely require an upper Heightening Awakener to achieve when dozens or hundreds of lower Heightening officials can basically do the same function for the vast majority of tasks at much lower risk. Capturing hundreds of First or Second Heightening officials is a lot harder to get away with due to the division of power. Awakening metal and Command breaking is really the main benefit, and Hallendren figured out the second and had good reason to discourage the first, considering Vasher is the one who setup the system. From a certain perspective, the Hallendren Court of Gods features a small weekly "vote" for the Returned to remain in power by feeding them Breath. There's actually a fair bit of security logic to the arrangement. The Returned are kept at a single Breath above death which removes many incentives to abduct them - you can't get standard Breath, you only get a healing, and if you want the healing, you have to pay a Breath for each week of attempting to extract the Divine Breath. Even abducting the God-King leaves you with a mute that has no knowledge of how to transfer their Breaths, and you need very specialized secret information only available to those who already know the principles of 10th Heightening mental Commands to get at the Breaths. Basically you had to already be or know a God-King to get a God-King's Breaths. Extracting Susebron's Breath never seemed to be a consideration for Bluefinger's cabal. Really though, it's not that different from voting in a Commander-in-Chief that leads a gigantic military as seen in the U.S. presidential election. A tremendous bestowal of power and resources is at the disposal of such an official in exchange for promises for what they will do once in power. As a nod to Quantus, there often is great respect for both the office and those elevated to such an office, but I don't think it would be viewed as deific. Well... if you did have an elected official view it that way, it raises some red flags.

@Oltux72, you stated better the case I was trying to make, that because of the nature of Scadrial it's so much harder to make predictions about the religions using Earth as a reference point. We have so little information about the doctrines that I'm having difficulty understanding how Sliverism or Survivorism developed to what we saw in Era 2, considering the entire population at the time of the Catacendre experienced the remaking of the world with the Words of Founding deposited in a pile. That said, I'm unsure on the proper nomenclature to not offend anybody, but I do have to quibble with someone of your statements. In part because it sounds like (and I could totally be wrong on this, and I apologize) you are making as broad statements as it seemed to you as perhaps it seemed I was making. I'll address them in no particular order. For example, this comment: This only works if you equate theism with reverence of the Shards, and I'll just point towards the best known Rosharan atheist for a viewpoint that could live through the Catacendre and remain a logical atheist. Actually, I'd say that freedom of religion can be just as complex considering Sazed doesn't want to be worshipped and included the hundreds of religions he had in the Words of Founding. Uh... other than the Terris and Malwish? They have creation stories and just because the relevant deities died doesn't preclude them as religions. Cosmere spoilers: This isn't to dispute the points about geological record (though I would be interested to know what it looks like after at least Rashek and Sazed have tampered with it by reshaping the world), but I'm not actually sure Scadrial has a fossil record. Cosmere spoilers Brandon's said Scadrial is a young planet and whether there are fossil fuels is something that's still in the air. As it is, the OP's question about how things will change boils down to what aspects of religion and the religious Brandon wants to represent and explore - and so I do expect some aspects to resemble IRL considerations. Which exactly, I have no clue. Maybe a rather lame stance, but Cosmere religions generally have to be vague so as to not be preachy and somehow not preclude Brandon's goal of not having a defined factually "right" religion.

They have a huge amount of flexibility and can reroute on command. MeLaan for example opted to store her memories in her thigh while her head only held sensory apparatus and an emergency canteen. MeLaan was able to reroute the human digestive tract sufficiently to let her belch from a mouth formed on her hand, presumably with all of the complications transferring the gas out to a limb would entail. She later used this setup when performing surgery on Marasi, taking a bite to let her replicate Marasi's tissue, suck out any of the bile spilled from the gut wound and expel it, before suturing her closed with tissues she already had ready. Soft tissue manipulation for Kandra is pretty standard. As for the sea urchin question, a mad hodgepodge of skeletons of various animals moving along is basically the default for Mistwraiths. Whether or not the specific bones articulate well or are suited for the mode of transportation are a separate issue but mix, match, and make do is the default. What Kandra do with mimicry and designed advantage is harder.

It's hard to say how theology will develop on Scadrial as we have relatively little information on the doctrine or requirements of the practitioners. I'm not sure if Survivorism, Sliverism, or the Path claim divine authority, at least in the context of creator, afterlife judge, omniscience, omnipotence, or if the object of reverence is even likely to intercede in their lives based on their actions. The Path are directed to not worship Harmony after all. Survivorists I think in general are supposed to survive and adhere to practices that will help in the overall survival of Scadians and Scadrial. For example, it won't be hard to agree with personal survival while not necessarily having a conviction that Kelsier held the power of a Shard, is immortal, and is still alive and kicking while blessing people from the Mists. The necessity of communal survival practices for the general population will probably come into question when the population hits carrying capacity, particularly when it inconveniences daily living and it becomes difficult to see how an individual's adherence matters among millions or billions. Knowing Brandon's general views on the LGBTQIA community and that one of the few taboos that we know for Survivorism is homosexuality, I expect this to be a point of conflict and religious unrest among the Survivorists. It will probably be asked if Kelsier really is a good moral model and if following his directives is in the best interests of the individual or community. I'm not directly familiar with Confucianism, so if anyone knows a practitioner or wants to chime in, please do so. Despite sometimes being described as the state religion of China, Confucius made no claim to a divine mandate, rather gave advice on moral and ethical conduct. As a result, Confucianism is sometime characterized as more of a philosophy than a religion, despite in many ways filling the same niche in directing individual practice. How this relates to Scadrial is if the religions are viewed and adhered to as moral philosophies based on great people or conflicting divine mandates dictating eternal salvation or damnation. Granted even only with philosophical differences, you can get extreme polarization and hostility just based on the direction a country's leaders are steering things. Era 2 already had many of the old crew elevated to extreme reverence even though we as readers know how much they bickering, got into random philosophical debates, and in general were ordinary people. MeLaan had conversations with Marasi on the subject. What people revere, unfortunately others seem to often ridicule or scorn, even if it's as simple as which band or sports team they like. To use a Judeo-Christian example, the Catacendre may end up viewed like Noah and the ark, with some believing and accepting it, some questioning if the whole planet could have really been flooded, and some not really caring because believing it doesn't really affect them much here and now despite being an example of a deity's power to restart a planet.

I have a poor man's version of what you want. Assuming the principal knows and is cooperating with the bodyguard(s), give them an Aviar like Sak that shows possible fatal futures. Use an earpiece to update the bodyguards. Unfortunately anyone Cosmere aware will start with eliminating the bird. A Bondsmith might be able to forge a Connection that extends the visions beyond the principal, closing the communication loop. No idea on the power requirements or duration though. An enlightened Truthwatcher may have some options, but that's pure speculation as Renarin has shown little control over his powers by RoW (still haven't finished WaT, so maybe more has been canonized). The prophetic visions may work if they can be used on command on a specific subject.

Brandon has said a few times that his favorite Final Fantasy game among a line up of angsty and dour protagonists is FFX with the chipper, happy-go-lucky Blitzball player Tidus. It wouldn't surprise me if he pays homage in some measure to his favorite game in this manner though, Stormlight Archive spoilers: Scadrian Invested sports certainly will exist once society has sufficient leisure time to accommodate it, and we already see Wax developing a simple Coinshot game with a metal weighted wicker ball to play with Max. Once Metalborn powers can be assigned, it likely will really take off. That said, it can be hard for authors to keep the audience engaged with a sport match for the same reason that Brandon tries to frame fight scenes as progressions with goals rather than an intricately blocked play-by-play. What is easy in a visual medium can be difficult in a written form. They generally have lower stakes, time has to be spent defining the game and field, and it can still lose readers who have a hard time visualizing scenes. Granted, Brandon can get away with a lot more since he has his art team to mitigate some of the complications.

I think the best indicator for how much control the kandra can have over their muscular system is TenSoon reclaiming the wolf hound body. It was presumably with his morphing muscles that he was able to sort through and place all of the fur into their proper pores on the fly. Being able to sift through individual hairs, identify each one, and put them in place as an afterthought makes moving like a centipede look simple. I expect Kandra will be able to mimic any animal of a similar scale, barring any materials or Invested abilities they can't replicate. That said, some mechanisms simply don't scale up due to the square cube law. A kandra-sized jumping spider will not be able to make the same proportionate leaps as their tiny counterparts because their mass increases by a higher factor than the cross section of the skeletal and muscular systems. Extra limbs also may not be as useful as you might expect. For example, think of the kinesthetics of throwing a proper punch. To get maximum power, the arm is not the only thing in motion, but the torso, back, hips, and legs all twist to add force to the strike. Adding multiple limbs to the strike adds a little bit of mass, but divides the force between the contact surfaces. More limbs for transport adds stability (useful for crustaceans in a tidepool, the IRL inspiration for Roshar), but presumably requires more energy to move in concert than a creature with fewer limbs. Humans as bipeds are among the top in terrestrial endurance animals on the planet with some native groups like the Rarámuri who hunt by running after prey animals until the target dies of exhaustion. Okay, maybe adding more arms and eyes may help when fire arms become prevalent, but I didn't notice particularly good reaction times from MeLaan or VenDell who were repeatedly surprised at how fast Wax reacted in a fire fight. Adding eyes and limbs is only useful if they can be used with accuracy. Admittedly there are also technical tasks when I wished I had a third hand and had to improvise with tools, teeth, or feet. What Kandra can do that others can't is swap between modes - so long as they are willing to pay the cost for carrying or placing the skeletal structures to accommodate the needed swaps. Considering how decidedly unstealthy MeLaan was lugging her sack of skeletons around in BoM, this is not trivial. What I would fascinating is a Roseite Aetherbound Kandra who could modify their skeletal structure on the fly. Wonder if we'll see one.

You're building a 4th Ideal Skybreaker? I wish I had more to offer, but that's going to be all sorts of complicated when you stack Plate on top of Lashings. Blades change mass when they resize, so it seems likely that Plate does as well, which can change force calculations if your character isn't just lifting an object, but tackling an opponent. Next, if it functions at all like Dead Plate, it also loses power as it gets damaged and runs low on Stormlight, though that would only happen when the Skybreaker is low as well. Add in that lifting strength benchmarks or height of a thrown opponent is with Roshar's reduced gravity and measurement scale, and we have a lot of moving sliders. I couldn't even begin to guess for an Earth comparison without a lot more detail for what numbers Ascendant needs. For example, when you have variable mass Plate, throwing a power assisted kick after falling x meters with y Lashes, which seems like a relatively basic Skybreaker move, my guess could be in the wrong county let alone in the wrong ballpark. My guess will definitely be wrong if the setting has a different gravity than Earth or Roshar and the Lashings adopt the locale.

Probably depends on the tactical situation and maybe even the Blade's shape. I could see a benefit where you have the Plate user equipped with a Shardhammer with their honor guard captain equipped with the Blade. A regular soldier equipped with a Shardblade may be able to provide better support than someone conventionally equipped. Going along with @Green Hoodie Mistborn, should the captain fall, the Plate user summons the Blade back and hands it off to the next in command. The size of the Blade, how heavy it is, the styles that accommodate the shape, and more probably will determine how effective it can be used without Plate's enhancement - since frankly Plate lets you use enemy combatants as improvised weapons in a pinch. A Blade shaped like a cleaver probably wouldn't work for this, but one like Taln's shaped like a spike (yes, I know that was probably his Honorblade, but his spren fans probably copied him, right?) could have been used as ammunition for siege engines by summoning it back after each shot. A ballista repeatedly firing a Shardblade at the base of a tower or the hinge of a gate could be terrifying. Might be able to take down a Chasmfiend or Thunderclast as well - possibly more effectively than a full Shardbearer just charging the behemoth. Plate would make winding the ballista faster, but it wouldn't offset its effectiveness at the front line. It's not pretty, but a Shardblade works well as a Connection-based tethered weapon - so long as you trust your troops to not turn it against you or to try to remove or damage the gemstone. Rather than having the Plate wielder be the one bonded to the Blade, have it bonded to your head tactician and equip them with a spyglass. As the battle flows, the tactician can identify sections that require reinforcement and can pull the Blade back to the command tent and send it off with the reinforcements to that area as well as summon it back should the currently equipped soldier falls. 10 second summon after dismissal isn't too bad, particularly if the tactician is mounted and can ride to the weakened section. Another scenario is when you want long range heavy duty suppressive fire from the Plate user equipped with a Shardbow while the Blade user slices terrain or fortifications. Yeah, there's a host of situations where splitting the strength enhancement and durability of the Plate from the supernatural durability, sharpness, and summonable Blade seems tactically sound. Really the biggest risk is if the gemstone that allows you to dismiss the Blade gets damaged meaning these strategies become substantially less risky with a living Blade. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Kaladin equip someone with his Plate, send Syl to arm another, all while he went to town with Stormlight healing, Lashings, and conventional spears.

Versions of this debate have been popularized as the "Trolley Problem" and there are countless places where one vs many debates show up. My personal feeling is that circumstances between each scenario are never identical, and that to simplify the problem necessary to make it a universal philosophical debate excises the details that provide useful information. The trolley problem is the scenario where a trolley is going down a track toward a unspecified group of people standing on the track, while someone stands at the track diverter and has the option to divert the trolley to hit a single person standing on the alternative path. I heard someone listen to the scenario and declare that this wasn't an ethics problem, it was an engineering/administrative problem that allowed this many people stray into the path of an on-coming vehicle in the first place. Just as an example of the shortcomings of this kind of either/or presentation of a problem. There are hosts of other examples. Insurance companies asked to provide funding for extremely expensive medical treatment for late-stage cancer patients versus approving dozens of lower cost medications for people not terminally ill. Medical first responders tasked with triaging disaster victims by likelihood of survival and being trained to tag individuals as dead or dying even though they could absolutely be saved if it wasn't during a large-scale disaster and personnel weren't spread so thin. An engineer asked to design a vehicle or bridge and balance cost and safety for a product that needs to stay within a budget to be implemented - knowing that perhaps with a couple more thousand dollars 1% more lives are statistically likely to be saved if a safety feature was included. School teachers with large classes who have to decide what level of material to teach - a level that 80% of the class will understand or slow teaching to a crawl for the remaining 20% who need individualized instruction, pushing the class as a whole behind in curriculum. Military faced with enemies using live hostage shields during combat. Teachers who have flagrantly disruptive students who almost certainly need one-on-one help or the the other 95% of the class who are losing instruction time as the teacher goes to manage the disruptive student - when if they were to be expelled the probability of them failing to obtain higher education, higher skilled jobs, and more, increases with expulsion. A shepherd with a flock of sheep when one goes astray with the question of cutting losses and preserving the rest of the flock or leaving the larger group unattended to rescue the one. I mention this one so you won't be surprised if an ethics question starts to involve questions of morality and religion. The list goes on. It's not always just an ethics problem, sometimes its resource constraints, conflicting parameters, time constraints with next to no time to deliberate, and more all make this branch of philosophy tricky at best in my opinion, though I only dabble in philosophy and generally against my better judgment. It gets pretty heated and in my opinion not the best example of one of our debates on 17th Shard, but there was seven pages of discussion on Roshar's version of the Trolley Problem. In one of the philosophical debates between Dalinar and Taravangian, they discuss a lord tasked with giving a judgment on a group of hogmen, only one of which was a murderer but who it was remained unknown. If this kind of thing interests you and you are fine with a bit of vitriol, here is the thread: I would caution against reviving that thread though.

I figure it boils down to Brandon canonizes all magics only when he's sure it will perform the function he needs it to for the story - and sometimes he can almost hardwire it into the core of a character. So long as a Resonance can reasonably fit with the base powers, he has given us sufficient ground knowledge and foreshadowing that it probably will only feel slightly contrived while giving him the flexibility he needs. Take Windrunners having more squires: taking care of others, building up a team to support each other, and welcoming in anyone who needs protection is basically who Kaladin is. It's difficult to imagine Kaladin without that, even though he was doing that long before he swore the Oaths. That active philosophy brings people together and enables them within the internal support structure in IRL too, Brandon just also made it magic. It's a chicken & egg thing, or as Syl puts it, does the spren make the wind or does the wind bring the spren regarding whether Kaladin's personality is what enabled him to achieve Radiance or if Syl helped shape him before the Ideals. Shallan had been painting a false, but better home her whole adolescent life and in small ways making it a reality. Her Resonance is also interwoven through her entire life and the lies of a perfectly normal and functioning home, the "fake it 'till you make it" attitude we see with Veil also can be seen IRL. I still think that Wayne's Resonance is his seemingly supernatural luck and that's baked in down to his lucky hat - and now we see him making a fortune in investments and making the first team sport league. Separating Wayne from the seat-of-the-pants mad improvisation is also basically impossible. I suspect that Resonances sometimes are born as Brandon gives a new character a powerset and then tries to imagine how their life would be using those powers, how it would change the way they perceive and interact with the world, maybe think about characteristics of exceptional people who do similar things, and then build the character, the Resonance, and their role in the plot either simultaneously or as a kind of balancing act to make sure that it works for the story as a whole. I don't think Resonances will ever be completely and conclusively canonized because I think they have to do with how someone with those specific set of powers comes to live differently and see opportunities and the world differently, and it's not just a matter of sitting down with a spreadsheet and going down the line with some notes. He'll probably use the same attitude as he has with the various RPGs, for each DM to make it their own and to come up with cool ideas (even though it totally doesn't future-proof campaigns from later canon).

I'd say insufficient data. Wax and Wayne became very weak Mistborn by burning tiny samples of Lerasium, far weaker than any naturally born Mistborn we've seen. The amount of Lerasium burned seems relevant. According to @Treamayne's WoB, only Vin and Elend hit "100%" Allomantic potential, though who knows what that means when both were at times directly fueled by the power of Preservation. Taken at face value, that means Kelsier, Kar, Zane, and even TLR as full Mistborn were not at 100% potential. We have a Sliver that utilized the Well of Ascension to directly make himself Mistborn who didn't make the cut based on that WoB. Allomantic potential is mutable and can grow with infusions of Preservation's power it seems. Elend directly after eating the bead was probably not 100%. Then again, there isn't much to say that all the Lerasium beads found anciently were equally sized or if the one Elend ate had degraded over a millenia (or grown). Again, I'd say insufficient data. By the end, yes, Elend was likely stronger than the ancient Mistborn, but I'm not sure about after newly gaining his powers.

So... I'd like to finish WaT so I can join in on the conversation but I'm having a real headache with the constant viewpoint jumps. Either I'm too tired to see the connecting ideas when 2-3 viewpoints from entirely different scenes get shoved together into each chapter, or the cognitive load to hold this many threads in my head simultaneously is too much for me and the target demographic is beyond me. I learned from Writing Excuses that there is a mental cost to the reader for each viewpoint change as they have to get back into the mind and status of the new scene - and I think this might be about 3-4 viewpoints past my limit (I've counted around 10-12 so far I think by around page 800?) Anyone have suggestions? Anyone in the same boat? How much will it ruin it if I take like 3 main threads (Dalinar & Navani, Kaladin & Szeth, maybe the flashbacks, and I'm not sure on the next big one) read those to conclusion and then go back and the other viewpoints? I read the encyclopedia for fun, articles on metallurgic techniques for discussion posts, and watch documentaries on concrete, but I get a headache from reading WaT. I've read about 2 ½ other books as a breather already. No idea if it's the number of viewpoints, if I worry that if I skim I'll miss some big fundamental aspect that was hinted at and have the climax not make sense and fall flat (like reading WoA and HoA as a teenager and somehow totally missing that Ruin was a thing until halfway through HoA), or if it's that I expect that the narrative is lying to me about what actually is going on and that I'll need to throw out all of my assumptions at the end? It wouldn't surprise me if other authors view WaT as a masterpiece of weaving disparate threads and themes together into a unified whole, but I'm getting lost. The 1200+ page long Sanderlanche is long since past cool and is now exhausting. Halp.

Kaladin fighting betrayal, cruelty, and despair almost always beats out actual combat for me. By which I mean WoK charging the Tower. The fight itself is awesome because it's not really the Parshendi that he is fighting, but a world and society that lets things like Sadeas' betrayal slide. Same with going against Moash at the end of WoR, pitiful fight though it was of a badly injured spearman against a Shardbearer - where the Shardbearer lost.

Huh. I just wrote something out about Radiant pregnancy on another Q&A and hadn't seen this one. My answers are kind of all over the place, and as a father, my information may be limited. First, the language that Brandon uses quite on often in the WoBs is that Cognitive perception imposes limitations on Spiritual based healing. Filter gets used too, but limits also is used often. That makes me think that healing is not always simply the way you think, and that you can't get too far from your Spiritual Ideal. Next, Radiants can at times subconsciously modify their own Spiritual Ideal and then heal to the modified Ideal. Some oddities that we've seen, likely including the Reshi king, may fall under this category. The spren bonds enables this modification when this would not work for a patient that they are applying Regrowth to. Personal modification is easier than modification of another. As for some of these other things... Regrowth is a subset of the Surge of Progression. The accompanying power of Growth allowed Lift to grow full trees from seeds in a matter of seconds/minutes. While we haven't seen Radiants utilize this on anything other than plants, the Fused Brand with Progression use it to form carapace weaponry and armor on command so at least localized acceleration is plausible. There may be further checks on this because healing is determined by both the Radiant and the patient - and an external person healing someone often is less effective than personally healing oneself. So I'm going to give the caveat that many of these more... unusual surgical procedures are much less likely to work when applied to a patient rather than a Radiant applying it to themselves. For example, I doubt a Radiant could forcibly age an enemy combatant into a geriatric barring the answer of throwing a ludicrous amount of Investiture at the problem. Because age is a component of the Spiritual Ideal, I'm also hesitant as to whether or not any checks were put on this power by Honor and Cultivation considering microkinesis was specifically curbed. Warbreaker and Mistborn spoilers (since I haven't seen Krenn post anywhere outside of Q&A and Stormlight, and these are big spoilers) For menstruation, as noted, Shallan complains about how she still gets her period even though she's a mythical Knight Radiant. Stormlight acting as a painkiller during childbirth probably also is out because it's normal - though the mother won't get nearly as exhausted from the contractions. In general I don't think Stormlight will "heal" the body actually functioning properly as it should. For example, here's a WoB that says a taser may work just fine to stun someone with healing abilities because the muscles are acting perfectly normally as they should when receiving electrical impulses - though he left himself room to reverse that. As for the prosthetic question, Mistborn era 2 spoiler, With the artificial twins, I'm guessing it would be substantially more complicated than removing the fetus and putting it back in. For natural twins, identical twins have to split within the first 3 days after conception in order to have their own placenta and amniotic sac, otherwise by day 8 they may share the placenta and amniotic sac with all of the accompanying complications. That's long before most mothers realize they are pregnant. By week 4-6 for monozygotic or dizygotic twins, there's questions of if Progression will sort out reattaching the first fetus to the placenta and reform the amniotic sac because by this point the body has setup the placenta(s) and amniotic sac(s) for the expected number of children - it shouldn't have any others in there. Forcing octuplets is not something I would expect Regrowth to do, as that's ovulation far from the average and I don't think that would be normal for that many monozygotic splits either. Progression might be able to do it - again with the caveat that a Radiant performing on themselves has more control over their Spiritual Ideal than Investiture applied to a third party. Pregnancy is a whole hormonal shift with changes all over the body - it's waaay more than just a fetus getting installed, the body needs to make a lot of changes to accommodate growing another person. Real estate adjustments is just the tip of the iceburg. In general though, I suspect that for most of these experiments the mind twisting necessary to make them possible as a function of Regrowth is waaay harder than is posited. How long did Kaladin keep his Shash brand despite actively wanting to have it gone? I would think that subconscious decision had much more weight than something like "I wanna see if I can have a third arm", never mind the skeletal structure changes necessary to make a third arm be anything other than vestigial. You'd have to have more than a few screws loose to look at a dead arm and legitimately think "Yup, that's mine. It goes aboooout here" or to believe you are someone else. You almost certainly couldn't graft to someone else who didn't want it, even if they were unconscious, barring a huge amount of Investiture.

My guess is that the belly button would not heal because certain injuries are normal and are not reverted to a previous state by Stormlight because of the Spiritual Ideal as mentioned by Treamayne - even when they are in the process of occurring. Shallan for example grumbles that becoming a super powerful mythic Radiant didn't exempt her from the discomforts of her period. The belly button of course is left over from the umbilical cord during gestation. To my knowledge at least there isn't a normal and natural way for the human body to have a perfectly smooth and flat stomach - there's either the umbilical cord or the belly button. In the same manner, a child Radiant like Lift will grow, lose baby teeeth, hit puberty, and basically develop as healthily as you could expect. You can imagine the issues that could occur if baby teeth refused to fall out and make room for adult teeth due to constant reinforcement from Stormlight or if the menstruation cycle just didn't happen. Because the umbilical is designed to be severed or otherwise fall off, I'd expect that a Radiant mother would not heal a cut on the umbilical cord after birth, and that a belly button would form as the normal process of the umbilical cord dries and falls off even if the child somehow gained Invested healing. Could be wrong though, but this seems likely to me. It's worth noting that even though Lift believes that she is 6 10 years old and has very good reason to believe she will remain 6 10 years old, she continues to grow into a gangly teenager even while constantly using Investiture. Cognitive perception probably can only get you so far against the Spiritual Ideal. Granted, Lift is such an outlier I probably shouldn't draw any conclusions from her, considering the source of her Investiture. As a side note, I learned that if the umbilical cord is not clamped and cut as is fairly standard practice, the umbilical cord will fall off normally after about 3-10 days. Leaving the umbilical on for this extended period is known as a "lotus birth". Learn something every day.

I felt obligated to chime in. Welcome fellow duck. Our flock is growing across the Cosmere. I knew someone who identified as an Apache Helicopter. Kind of a mouthful to talk to. What are you looking for in the 17th Shard? Interests in the forums? Reading, sharing fan theories? Role playing? Just discussing books with people who have also read them?

Thanks Paleo! Logged in just fine. Windows sign in did not give me a "verify I'm human" page, but it did for the mobile login. No idea on the granularity that Cloudflare has, but feel free to @ or DM me and have me log out and log back in if you want a guinea pig to test changes to these settings. Looks like we had 4 members get flagged that could still report the issue, so that either is a pretty good false positive rate, or hiding everyone that couldn't even report, sign in, or register a new account. I for one am fine with trying to work with the VPN on my side to try to gain access if the new setting means you and the other mods have to go back to mass banning bots. That said, I do worry that seems to be a risk of humans not being able communicate at all with 17th Shard with the old settings so long as they are limited to devices on the VPN. Well, hopefully others with similar issues will look at the tech support forums and find this. Anyone who can't sign in because of Cloudflare, if you have a VPN (virtual private network) ask the administrator for your device if you're not sure if you have one, it may have been flagged as a bot and you may need to find a device not on the VPN to temporarily login and report the issue to the admins. Hopefully that's enough keywords that this will pop up in a site search.

Wax and Wayne take potential Seekers into account in every infiltration it would be relevant. Wax gets pinged while wandering through Lady Kelesina's party for his use of Allomancy. Wax has to surrender weapons at various parties lest the house Lurcher/Coinshot be summoned to check his possessions. Sneaking into the Set fort in BoM required Wax and Wayne to avoid using Allomancy right up until Telsin shot a guard. We don't see Wax bother when infiltrating the Vanisher hideout or the Set tower in TLM because he wasn't sneaking, he was the Lawman/Sword on the hunt. Wax does think about the possibility of a Seeker in the mansion when he breaks into Innate's safe, but he figured he would have enough time to grab and run, particularly when the Governor was not on site. Basically, Metalborn security does crimp Wax's ability quite frequently. Wayne is good enough at disguises for it to not matter in his case. Besides, we don't really see Wax hunt anyone down except the Set and Bleeder and known criminal elements. It's hardly fair to say everyone else (who aren't antagonizing Dawnshot) are stupid when Wax was usually working with them legitimately. I think my point still stands that it would have been foolhardy for Daal to assume that the basin was this shortsighted when we're talking about sneaking in a grenade into the Senate. Security this lax is pretty inexcusable, particularly as Daal would have had equal opportunity to blast the majority of the Elendel governing officers with a more conventional grenade on his way out with the Bands. Actually, this is really my main issue with the OP. Foreign power sneaks in a bona fide grenade into the Elendel Senate, gets away with it, and does nothing else to further military interests like bombing the government.

This feels like it should be easier to validate. Perhaps erroneously, I would assume that the Elendel Governor would warrant Metalborn guards. Seeker, Tineye, and Coinshot are all logical options for passive surveillance - though I don't remember any of this being conclusively stated. Alternately, perhaps some of the noble lords with their purer Allomantic lineages (Wax being the prime example), may have been Allomancers. I think Seekers can hear when Aluminum is burned. Kar seemed to know immediately when Vin was forced to burn Aluminum to wipe her metal reserves, so I assume a Seeker would know if Aluminum were burned or if their powers were nullified. Even if they didn't recognize the pulse of Aluminum, they absolutely should report any unusual Allomantic pulses near the Governor. If the Tineye was close to the Governor or in the room, they probably would have been able to hear the buzzing of the grenade since those grenades require proximity. It also seems logical to call in a Coinshot to check with Steelsight if the Bands are drained. Those seem like obvious checks that both the Basin and the Malwish should have expected, and I'm not sure how this underhanded method would circumvent those checks unless Daal thought he could intimidate and talk his way into getting the Bands fast enough to bypass this. Seems sloppy and risky though.

I'll add myself to this, as I have a productivity VPN on my mobile and laptop that doesn't seem to play nice with Cloudflare. This has not gone away by itself, and I had to log in on a different device to even be able to report it. Cloudflare blocked logging in, submitting a guest comment, or even using the Contact Us feature at the bottom of the website. On that note, it may be worth adding in an email that can be used to contact the forum someone on the website if we get a similar situation to mine as I didn't have a valid method to report the issue without finding a whole new device. Laptop Cloudflare Ray ID: 8f40aa7adf3a0911 Mobile Cloudflare Ray ID: 8f40a9120f4b08aa

Looking at the Arcanum for Nalthis, it also seems somewhat safe to assume that while extremely rare, people other than the Returned have been able to reach some of the upper Heightenings because they have a ballpark number for the number of Breaths required for each of those Heightenings - 2000 for Agelessness. This number presumably is estimated based on the aura recognition gained at the first Heightening. Life extension occurs for lower Heightenings and reaches peak efficacy at the 5th Heightening, so there must be some gradation or measurable change beyond "does not age" Because of this, I hypothesize that at least some of the arcanists of the Cosmere, likely Silverlight, have a method to view the changes done to the soul and can more or less confidently say that 5th Heightening grants agelessness. They need something separate from the empirical method of waiting for them to die - oh wait, immortality. Testable immortality without some sort of secondary metric, be it viewing the Spiritual Ideal changes, or something else, seems difficult to prove. Notably, Nalthis is a young planet without even a fossil record and Awakening is a relatively newly discovered and researched art. There probably isn't much by way of empirical agelessness, yet the arcanists label it as such. Regardless, the Invested mechanism for "does not age" is not one that I think we have much of the specifics on. Age is a spiritual aspect that can be manipulated via Feruchemy and was the death of TLR. Being an Elantrian is one of the more taxing forms of immortality for whatever reason. This is one reason why I'm not sure how to tie it in with the rest of the Heightenings.

Partner with the first interplanetary Chouta food chain. With the economic might of Chouta, immortality via Breath should easily be in reach for my co-founders and me. Expand my empire until I have other vital trade commodities and sell to both sides of the coming Era 4 war. Pick up the pieces and cement my economic dominance. You just gotta have a cousin in the right places.

Hm... back to the original thoughts on Heightening, let's look at a few things. First, it's worth noting that Breaths are not just loose or passively held Investiture, they are part of the holder's soul. Considering the effect that holding a Dawnshard even temporarily has on a person's soul, I think it's safe to say that Dawnshards operate in a similar manner. This is different from inhaling Stormlight or burning Steel, where Investiture is drawn through the Spiritweb or Nahel bond to cause a magical effect either internal or external. This also seems to be a separate phenomenon from Savantism where the soul is distorted from long term usage of Investiture. It's also worth noting that as far as I can tell, Yumi as a Yoki-hijo, despite being Invested beyond a Returned, did not seem to have any Heightening advantages except perhaps Agelessness - and that can be explained by her nature as a Cognitive Shadow with a huge amount of Investiture. Similarly, I don't think I've seen any Heightening-like boosts for the Heralds or Fused despite also being highly Invested. Considering how designed Elantrians are, I'd reserve judgment on if their enhancements are by a similar mechanism to Heightenings when many of the boosts could simply be programmed in. From this, I think Heightenings may be a specific enhancement of the soul, not merely holding incrementally increasing amounts of static Investiture. Next, let's look at what the different Heightenings actually do within the context of Awakening (at least to start). Other than agelessness, they seem to fit into 2 general categories, sensory enhancement, and Command enhancement. Aura recognition, Perfect Pitch, Perfect Color Recognition, Perfect Life Sense, and Awakened Object recognition all are enhancements of natural senses as considered by Vasher. Other heightening enhance the Awakener's ability to have their Commands obeyed, such as Command breaking, Instinctive Awakening (which this WoB says means that your Commands are obeyed instinctively), Commanding unliving targets (which we learned from TSM is specifically difficult to make such things valid targets), and Commands obeyed through mere word or thought. Perfect Invocation may also fit this, and I'd guess the color distortion is just a continuation of the aura gained by holding BioChroma. Notably Awakened objects have sensory awareness that is used to fulfill their Commands. Actually, considering the similarities between Breaths and Dawnshards, where Breaths are endowed by Command and according to the mythology Returned are Commanded to return, Breaths seem to be closest Investiture to Dawnshards of any of the systems. Perhaps all Breaths are Commands in the same way that Dawnshards are. As we learn from the Dawnshards, Commands really can be bestowed, sit around in objects, be absorbed, and otherwise enhance people and things. Breaths may just be a lower power version of the Dawnshards, where instead of the Commands of Adonalsium, they are the Commands of Endowment, the Returned, or any Awakener. If we're running with this, then Heightenings are incremental levels of power to obey and give Commands, and perhaps the sensory enhancement is part of enabling the target to obey the Command. Still trying to fit in Agelessness. Could be obeying the Command, "My life to yours, my Breath become yours."

As a frequent audio book listener, I have the reverse problem of having a defined audio format, but no idea on how to spell it. This sometimes means I will totally fail to make connections when I go on forums or read something that I had only heard. I think I totally missed whenever anyone talked about the Catacendre on the forum or some of the Fused Brands until I read it enough times to make it click. Not sure, but Demoux may have also fit in this category, since I'm not great with French pronunciations. These days I check the Coppermind for proper spellings.