Light In the Darkness

As far as I'm aware of the physics, which is pretty aware for not being a physicist, that's the afterimage, not the actual Item. Otherwise, the light reflected off the item would never actually stop coming off it, which it does eventually because there has to eventually be a last emitted photon. Black holes are black, not the color of everything that ever fell in them. Therefore, the mass does enter the black hole; otherwise it would never get larger, either. So, no. Occasionally space does. Kind of. Or, if you'd like, it starts moving backwards in time? Because C as the speed limit applies to motion through all of spacetime, not just space? Or perhaps it shifts universes after dodging the singularity ring in a spinning black hole, or perhaps any other number of things. We really don't know and can't really tell, since we don't have any convenient ones to study.

This brought to mind for me the magnet specialist from Big Hero 6, and it made me wonder how difficult it will be for the Scadrians to put metallic arts to work in small scale things, like Ball Bearings - this could potentially allow for some very cool suspended systems even in personal transportation technology, and the efficiency allowed by what amount to hyper-efficient magnetic ball bearings via miniaturized metallic arts could also become incredibly powerful tools for lurchers, augmenting the skill available to a lurcher-skater like we've been talking around. Of course, once magnetization is more widely used, you could have marvels like bullet trains for significantly cheaper, electricity wise, by employing teams of lurchers and coinshots. I'm thinking along the lines of the train systems in Rhythmatist or Ba Sing Se from The Last Airbender. Sorry, I think I've pulled us a ways from the original thread topic lol These are just really cool things to think about. Maybe I should go start a thread in a more appropriate area, like under Mistborn, lol.

We see an effect adjacent to that with the singers using lifelight, emeralds, and rhythms to make plants grow faster. I don't know that dance is going to as much; the gemstones with Light were necessary to those effects because they needed a power source, whereas on Sel the power being in the CR made it more accessible via physical shapes/patterns.

Or just use Heelys? Or normal roller-skates/-blades? would not be surprised if that became a lurcher standby after a while; the second two must not be far off in terms of Scadrian tech, and the first probably isn't for specialists like Ranette. Side note: an Iron Pipe would work well for both Coinshots and Lurchers to move exceptionally quickly in, given, minimal air resistance/appropriate protection. Lurchers can slow down by pulling on the tube behind them, and stay centered by pulling on it at equal angles around them. Coinshots can obviously do something similar. Metal sewer lines just became vital plot points. This also leads to epic quick-launch systems for aircraft, or even just missiles, with iron compounders or crashers. Aircraft carriers become a lot simpler when instead of tethers to fling the planes you just need a dude and enough buoyancy to handle the excess weight. Also, you could use them to effectively rig railguns, coil guns, etc., and enough of them could even replace a major portion of a rocket's first stage booster - two-four of them would probably work, especially if they are accustomed to tapping in sync/at similar rates. Now I'm thinking of "the Deader/Rocket Twins" as a really fun idea. Twin Twinborn, lol. Also this is epic; I like this a lot. This would be extremely useful in space, including in war: one-man boarding craft if the ship has accessible metal on it. Until aluminum shielding becomes dirt-common, this will be exceptionally effective.

Slingshotting could actually be very useful in a situation like this if you have starting momentum, but could be very dangerous. hmmm. But yeah, this weirdness is part of why Iron Mistings are called Lurchers - their trajectories aren't very smooth.

Something to be aware of: So it seems like Preservation's number is actually 16; a couple of other WoBs refer to it this way in asking a question like this about shardic numbering, and Brandon has never been like "that's not actually Preservation's number, so I think that is a pretty good guess; I like the idea of the stability/unchangingness angle on why that was the number given to him, and it being particularly significant to Adonalsium too.

This is an interesting way of looking at it! I think there is something here. My only holdup is that we know two of the dawnshards now; the one held by Rysn is Change, and the one held by Sigzil is Exist, IIRC, at least in the English books. Change could also be Espiritual Journey, instead of Move, which would mean this still works, and I think this division with four shards being more "purely" tied to each command fits well, since we've seen potential "pure" shards in Honor - connection - and Preservation - existence.

I think part of this is probably him trying to avoid the series becoming like Wheel of Time. He already has to offload major characters' minor stories into novelas to keep the books small enough to be physically possible and still give everyone the stories they need for the plot we have; the fading into the background might be a bit of a way to help the world feel much bigger than he has the time and space to describe. I do wonder if the brothers or Sebarial and Pelona or any of the other side characters we've met will become more relevant in future books; the absence of the brothers in particular is a bit odd. I'm sure they'll turn up in an important place in the back half.

So, it seemed implied that the imbalance was necessary in making humans on Scadrial when the creation story of the Terris religion was told. Per HoA Epigraph 54: Sapience in other areas of the Cosmere originated separately - much of it came about pre-shattering, or cultures from inhabited planets pre-shattering journeyed elsewhere post-shattering. So cultures elsewhere, as you mentioned in spoilered text, don't necessarily have an imbalance in their critical investiture - the investiture that lets them be aware and think independently. It's true that full sentience and sapience really only seem to require some threshold of investiture be met in the cosmere at large, but for some reason, in this case - possibly because of the nature of Ruin and Preservation - an imbalance in the composition of that critical investiture was required for it to happen.

So, I think that this was, to an extent, intentional. This is clearly a very, very long time after SA. He has been running from the Night Brigade for a while; I think him more or less just being exhausted is exactly what he was feeling. I think He was probably more sad about leaving Elegy than about Aux dying - he already went through most of his grief for Aux, since he no longer had much of a body left. He had already acknowledged his broken oaths, and while sad for the final end, he knew it was coming for a long time. Like seeing someone you care about get in a car wreck, and then not quite die immediately - getting hospitalized, living on life support, until eventually they finally fade the rest of the way. A lot of the emotional impact will be at the event, and then the final passing might mostly encounter you while you're numb. It's a character perspective that we don't get a lot from Sanderson, but it nevertheless is a valid one, and I don't think he intended for anything else, emotionally, except perhaps wanting us to feel more connected to him than it seems like you guys did. I agree that the flashbacks might have helped, but I think a lot of that will be revealed in the rest of SA, so we will see if knowing some of that helps. With this I think there is more to it than his emotional state. I think its cause by the progression of his Torment - whatever odd curse was caused by his holding whichever dawnshard. Wit exhibits the same symptom with being unable to hurt others intentionally, but being able to "wiggle out" of it via changing his perception of his actions. Sigzil has done this repeatedly, and the Torment has been growing stronger and adapting to his tricks, making it harder for him to use them. While he still had active oaths to protect others, they overrode the torment completely, but since he broke them/gave them up they haven't done that. At the beginning of the story he is still getting away with some of those mental tricks, and when he manages to hurt someone, the torment adapts to prevent it working again. So he can't make sharp things for a while, until he convinces the torment solidly that it couldn't be for violence against a person, and then when he's able to skim that part of the torment out of himself into the sunheart. So I think his power level shifts are actually kinda cool and actually rather consistent, he's just dealing with a very odd condition. It would have been cool to see him need to improvise in that scene though, like the bombs or the mountain maneuver you mention. So I disagree that he's such a big problem - I think it's probably exactly the story Sanderson intended - but I can understand wanting Sigzil to do something like using the mountains instead of Aux working again, and I concur that it was much harder to connect with him emotionally in this story than with the main characters in most of Sanderson's stories.

So, I would counter this with the imbalance of the shards. As they mingle, it will become easier for them to stay in harmony, but Preservation's power is currently measurably weaker than Ruin's, because Preservation's life spark is what allows human sapience on Scarial. A balance of the two doesn't allow free thought, only one being measurably stronger in the soul does. Leras, when he trapped Ruin, forced the imbalanced piece of him to begin solidifying into Atium, which he planned ahead to be burned away before Ruin could get to it and incorporate it. It's now been hundreds of years since that process stopped and the pits were destroyed, and since the essence was burned away, we know it will eventually make its way back to being under direct control of the shard - it's a bit of a cycle. By the end of Era 2, enough time has passed that the pits could restart producing, if they are still a valid perpendicularity-place (they would have if the catacendre and the merging of Harmony hadn't happened, but we don't have clarification on how that's been affected now) which means the excess Ruin burned out of usability just before Sazed Ascended is probably beginning to reinforce the portion of him that is Ruin, unbalancing the power available to each side and tainting Harmony (the shard that was slowly being created by the mingling and cooperation of the powers) towards Ruin, hence Discord - a state of destructive opposition. So I don't think the trend towards Discord is because the shard was trending that way all the time; a Vessel's Intent for the power can change its "spin," so to speak, slightly. Ruin, with a different vessel, might have been temperable towards "Entropy" from where it was, instead of "Ruin." I think the trend towards discord is more likely caused by the excess of Ruin. I think you misunderstood me here. I meant that the situation with Sazed controlling Snapping makes me wonder if there are more allomancers that would take so much to snap, that Sazed judges it cruel, and prevents them from being snapped by the Mists. We don't know how much Sazed has changed Snapping, but if it's him doing it, via the mists, he's just lowered the thresholds, then he could conceivably be hiding a lot of potential allomancers by simply not snapping them - these could be the weakest, or strongest, or who knows. As to the lines, I think you may have understood Brandon a little incorrectly. When Sazed does something with his power, he doesn't "burn up" his body very much (depending on the change). Sazed was able to adjust a lot of the problems with the world without unbalancing himself - either he was very, very good at using both powers equally, which is possible, or the imbalances there weren't sufficient to give either shard much of an edge, whereas the power being deposited as Atium or being used to make sentient life both use enough to imbalance him. I think what Brandon meant there is that when Allomancers use normal allomancy, they are accessing Preservation's power more like when Sazed moved the planet, as opposed to burning it up the way using Atium or burning the mists or Lerasium does. In that same WoB, he says that burning Lerasium establishes a connection between them and "the mists" and "the powers of creation" - Lerasium is literally part of the body of Preservation; it wouldn't forge that connection to all 16 shards - it couldn't. It forges a connection between Preservation and the new-made allomancer - a mistborn if pure, or a misting if alloyed with a particular viable metal. So Allomancers have strong, peculiar connections to preservation, and when they burn metals, they pull part of preservation's investiture through that connection for a particular effect, which is small enough that it doesn't cause an imbalance. This is why Savants exist - as the power is consistently used for a purpose, the user's body becomes more and more adapted to letting it do that, and retains some residual effects. Therefore, Allomancers must be pulling investiture from Preservation for what they do. So, Allomancy does depend on a "line" to Harmony (the preservation part of him), but Harmony can't exert much deliberate control on its use, which in turn means it doesn't meaningfully drain or burn up much of his power. Edit: Brandon has said that the Well of Ascension and the Pits of Hathsin "are no more, for now." The argument that such an amount of time would allow Ruin's part of Harmony to be regaining the imbalance in power still stands on what it did before, though.

Mostly for the meme - glowing eyes brought this to mind. Cool shirt though! I think I agree with Treamayne's feedback.

This would have been cool, but I think it was just a little too early. They didn't feel the need domestically until BoM, so even though they have the materials, they hadn't laid enough groundwork for that to happen by the time of TLM. It wouldn't be far in the future for this to happen though, which is a good point - I forgot conventional aircraft would be possible too. I'd imagine helicopter-like things would be first, since that's what they've seen with the Southerner machines, and then maybe they'll move on to lateral approaches. On Earth, dirigibles, specifically Zeppelins, preceded mass-market internal combustion engine cars; this may have been accelerated due to physical Allomancy, since the stunt Vin pulls with the horseshoes is reminiscent of such engines. It is odd that nobody seems to have been researching it though. We don't even see steelpushers using gliders, though a nicrobursted coinshot could go quite a distance with limited fuel, I think because they can go faster jumping from place to place on the ground, which is also more maneuverable. Powered flight would trump this though, so maybe a powered glider launched like that would end up being where they go first, instead of helicopters. In any case, this area of research should explode soon, but I can see how there wouldn't have been enough time between BoM and TLM for it to really happen, especially since the Southerners were willing to trade Harmonium at first. It would be fun to watch the tech explosion happen though! I wonder if we could get a short story on it.

This is all true; I think what I meant with that phrase was more that an understanding of rockets themselves - the fuel-burning engines that we have tuned to extremely high efficiencies, and the complex mechanics involving significant mass changes as fuel is burnt off and the like - would not be quite as necessary. Additionally, due to cheaper materials, a salvo of ICBMs with destructive warheads could be launched with varying angles and more simple orbital trajectories - angled to hit near earth orbit or just inside it, not quite hitting escape velocity, and then come down close to a target city. That math is simple enough, from what I recall, if you ignore atmospheric interference - meaning your accuracy diminishes appreciably. This would turn an ICBM's rifle into a shotgun - less effective and damaging, but a smidge easier to aim, and cheaper to produce. Such missiles would never be precision strikes - but in that case, who cares where the collateral damage lands? You have a million of the missiles, shoot one, watch where it lands via spies or the like, adjust trajectory, and when you get close enough, send a hailstorm. Inaccurate, but far cheaper and less technology-reliant than our missiles today, meaning they would be deployable much earlier in history. This might kill this darling yet, but with Aluminum about to be made very cheap and metallurgy having been a very refined skill on Scadrial for a while now, the machined tolerance you mention might be achievable long before rocket engines are for the Scadrians. This might actually be a desired outcome. Allomantic interactions like this would make space exploration so much easier; a satellite would need no rocket engines or complex staged mechanism for reaching orbit - just one really strong launch, and some course-correcting fins and minor engines. Spy satellites could proliferate with ease, and if you can control the Gs while accomplishing the needed acceleration, small manned spacecraft would be excessively feasible. This would eliminate a large amount of space junk pollution, which is a threat to our current infrastructure of satellites, and allomantic pushing or pulling machines could easily clean up any metal debris that does end up in orbit. This would also be a perfect set up for dropping orbit missiles like you said would be easier, and it seems attainable. Thanks for this reminder, though it wouldn't surprise me if this was achieved similarly to our internal combustion engines - very, very carefully measured reactants - or a controlled rocket burn. I wouldn't really mind either way.

That was actually so good! They timed that very well with the music too. I'd love to see it fleshed out to higher FPS and in color, and maybe if they extended the song a bit to allow them to cover each scene a little more fully, but this has helped sell me on this idea significantly.

This gave me an interesting thought - if the southerners haven't found nicrosil and what few nicrobursters they have, then the northerners could make excessively more powerful guns, assuming harmonium stores the pushes and pulls they receive at the strength they received them. If a coinshot in a metal-less room flared and was nicrobursted, at absolutely maximum power, as much steel as possible, right next to a harmonium cube, then used it in a specially designed gun, they could launch projectiles a hundred times faster than bullets - they would effectively have long-distance missiles that need only metal for fuel, potentially strong enough to launch ICBMs, with minimal need for rocket science. Very small amounts of harmonium could also be used for similarly-built bombs that simply throw shrapnel at excessive speeds or even debris the way a hazekiller round does, to avoid defenses based on the same principles. They could even make double bombs - time a metal-pushing charge, and then have a small amount of water around it break an instant later as a second explosion/detonation in case the first fails. This is assuming, of course, that the timing on the release is controllable/dialable. Actually, there might be hidden compounding here. Water releases all of the investiture in harmonium as energy and turns it into something else, according to my best understanding of the reaction, since I don't think pieces of God Metals are just created and scattered everywhere whenever one of those bombs explode, but something is left behind, if I remember the WoBs correctly. So, if all the investiture is drained, what happens when a charged harmonium piece is detonated? If it converts a significant amount of the investiture, maybe proportional to the charge, into the same investiture as its charge, which honestly seems possible based on the way the metallic arts have behaved thus far, then you could release an allomantic charge significantly stronger than the one stored by blowing up a charged piece of harmonium. This would also explain how a very small priming could start a flying machine like the southerners have, and explain what they must be using for fuel - there's no way Brandon allowed them to be perpetual motion machines, given they never stop. Maybe I should make a thread for this. But this would bias a potential war significantly in favor of the northerners if they have a non-trivial amount of harmonium, though lacking flying machines would still make it difficult. There is also the possibility that Harmonium will begin to form again in the Pits or the Well, if Wax flying around down there didn't screw it up, either option of which would be very possible.

This does make me wonder if perhaps there are more, maybe weaker, allomancers, or if perhaps Harmony has been hiding certain lines with allomantic talent to leave them in reserve for when necessary... that could make for some powerful reserves, and potentially give him a control for some of the violence and power levels in the population.

So, I was thinking about this, and I think it would have the opposite effect of what we want. The Harmonium would be unavailable as a store until the duraluminum is burned all the way through, which it would all burn up in an instant - that's how duraluminum works - but the harmonium wouldn't be exposed until after that, so it wouldn't be burned by the duraluminum flash, I think. So it would be exposed for a hot second and the results might not be great, and I think you would probably end up with no duraluminum assistance. So it depends on the speed of the burn-flash and such things, but the results are likely not as clean as we've been wishing here. I think another coating, one that's thinner in terms of allomantic reserve isolation and that doesn't completely prevent burning the covered metal, would be wiser and safer. I thought we have rough potential measurements; we know a rough ingot size for the lab explosion, I think, which was much stronger than the water one, and we know the explosion that Wayne causes with the water-reaction is larger than any other human-made one, and I think the rough size of those harmonium pieces. Between those sizes and explosions I think we have enough to make some energy equivalence estimations; I just don't have the equations or the books in front of me. Anyone?

Not sure this would be a good idea; wax isn't very durable, and humans by nature move things around when they're sitting in our moths. This could end very badly far too easily.

Thanks for the reference! I’ll read that thread. The gelatin capsule is a good idea, but I wonder if allomancers can burn metals not in the stomach - we know they eventually leave and can be poisonous. Also, I was thinking about this a bit more, and could an alloy of harmonium be more stable? God metals are supposedly a means to entirely new sets of 16 allomantic metals, in addition to the power of the metal alone. Would that be an easier way to gain more information on the effects of raw harmonium?

This is a good argument, but honorblades are also more like unsealed metalminds - the energy that flows from the bond between a spren and a person is instead held directly in the honorblade, unlocked for any user. As a result, the honorblades have the investiture of being god-metal - assumedly approximately mass-equivalent to a shardblade - plus the semi-feruchemical charge of the power, which is significant, and adds more investiture than a person's consciousness seems to - a la Sunheart filled vs. unfilled, and Nightblood v. honorblade vs. nightblood v. thunderclast or person or Returned (I wonder if nightblood is a significant rational behind hoid's protections from yumi?)

So, harmonium blows up in water, which makes it hard to burn allomantically to find out what it would do. But what if it was coated? The mechanism of metal burning isn't well understood, but could an Enteric coating, or even a metal shell, protect a bead of harmonium for long enough for it to be allomantically used? What would the effect be? As part of the risk analysis, does anyone know what the energy density of harmonium is in a harmonium-water explosion? I think we know about enough to calculate rough numbers, but I don't have the time right now or book access to do any of it.

^^This^^ it would be much more damaging to steal attributes, anyway, which have more bindpoints and cheaper spike metals. This significantly increases lethality of bullets, assuming they come back out of the person - something much harder to do, and which makes crossfire oddly dangerous.

Solid idea.

Good point! It's fairly clear from the Wax & Wayne books that the temporal compression rate is tied to a few things, including strength of innate power, skill/savantism, and rate of bendalloy burn. However, we see with Bleeder that F!Steel has the ability to match, approximately, the speed enhancement of a speed bubble - while inside one, Wax, Wayne &c. see Bleeder, obviously tapping speed, moving at apparently a normal speed outside of it. Granted, the amount of speed she was tapping was enough to literally be moving in bullet time; she isn't sprinting across the room either - just walking, IIRC. Average human walking speed is roughly 5 ft/s, average bullet speed from 1890 (steam-era) was something like 2500 ft/s, which means she was tapping speed at roughly 500 times normal - if she was jogging instead of walking, about 250 times. I might just be wrong about how fast she was going, but speed bubbles generally seem to let you see bullets at a speed that lets them be dodged, which means they probably compress time similarly and she appeared to be normal speed from inside the bubble, implying the same thing I calculated in my rough math above - the temporal compression they were achieving was likely about 500x normal. The problem you mention with the effective speed compounding at work here is an interesting one; it's in line with a thread I made years ago about how F!Nicrosil works, since you're storing your ability to store your ability to store....etc. Its hard to answer, but since the effects don't overlap nearly as much, it seems like an equilibrium would be reached eventually, but it would depend on the amount of bendalloy the user has and the rate at which they burn it. This could still very easily and ridiculously multiply the amount of speed you can store over time, as shown above, assuming you have enough bendalloy to keep the bubble up nearly continuously. It would probably feel horrible though, because you would be perceiving time as if inside your speed bubble - you would feel like you were moving horrendously slow, but your real-time speed would be normal. It would be quite the brain trip, and would take a lot of practice to get used to.