Trusk'our

Yes. HOLY GOODNESS, WHY CAN'T I SUMMON MY BLADE?! (Corrupt Sibling is around, I presume?)

Yeah, pewter and gold would probably let someone live a bit longer than normal, since it would help someone very elderly withstand frailty and disease, but Spook would've needed than that to live as long as we think he did. I think that it's possible, likely even, that Marsh would've shared his Atium stash. Plus, Spook is also a Pre-Catecendre individual, so I think it's likely that he could still Compound via Hemalurgy.

Plus, through a totally legit "accident", a train carrying an active Harmony bomb is speeding toward them all.

Haven't read that one yet, but I look forward to it! Oh yeah, and The Evil is there too.

Hemalurgic monsters that each have thirty-two Maximumly Invested Hemalurgic iron spikes.

And Discord has broken free of Harmony and is wreaking havoc on them all.

And a pantheon of Autonomy's Avatars directing an army of Sandmasters.

Good points. I hadn't considered Identity like that before, but yeah, that makes a lot of sense; Identity is combined with Connection to record and determine your past, so when something like Forgery changes that, it effectively changes your past and therefore your present. When you heal with Investiture, you're matching your physical self to what your Spiritweb has determined is your most healthy self when filtered through your Cognitive Aspect. Interesting things to consider. Now what I'd like to know is what separates Identity from Connection and how they're so deeply intwined? Of course, I know we'll need to read and find out, but still...

With a legion of angry Shades on the loose.

Yeah, with duralumin Hemalurgy taking both Identity and Connection, I think that it's very likely that your Connection influences your Identity. Now, what kind of Connections do so would be an interesting question. Is it just ones that are tied to your birth and parentage? Otherwise, a Feruchemist storing attributes may not be able to tap them at a later date due to their new Identity no longer being recognized by the Metalminds.

That is a fair way to interprit that. My personal thinking is that Hemalurgy is currently being somewhat suppressed- it's currently on the opposite side of the spectrum as it used to be, weaker than the "vanilla" version of Hemalurgy should be, and that it was in a stronger than what its normal state should have been pre-Catacendre due to Ruin's influence. But of course, we'll need to wait and see how things play out in the books to confirm if that's true.

Hmmmm. I've kind of wondered what determines one's Identity. Is it your past experiences, or is it only your sDNA?

I finished reading Tress recently, and immediately my mind turned towards Bendalloy. Honestly, I really want to see a Consumer Ferring villain down eighty barrels of water, then bond a couple hundred Midnight Athers, then create a Chasmfiend/Larkin-thing duplicate that attacks the protagonists as they do a chase scene in race cars on Roshar during a Highstorm. That would be fun

Okay, so Compounding isn't normally possible via Hemalurgy due to Identity contamination; so long as the Identity of the Hemalurgic spike and that other power (whether it be another spike or a natural Metalborn power) aren't the same. But what if you Forge someone into a Misting for a certain metal, Hemalurgically spike the power from them, use Forgery to turn them into a Ferring for the same kind of metal as they were a Misting for, spike that power out, and then you give them both spikes afterward. Would they be able to Compound since both spikes technically work from the same person? Or, what if you instead give the spikes to someone else? Would they be able to Compound since the spikes share the same Identity, and even though the Hemalurgist's Identity is there to muddy things up, it does so equally to both. So would that still work? Honestly, Forgery and Hemalurgy just go so well together.

I think that Elend could do it normally, he just didn't have the opportunity to do so; most of their activity by HoA is combating Koloss and Inquisitors, not sneaking around a nobleman's mansion in the dark and picking out enemy Mistborn. Ha! Exactly Yeah, they probably thought that Atium would be super good, so they decided to take it and hope for the best. Wonder how they felt once they got it. Well, it sounds like it actually could work as normal Allomantic Atium so long as the proper Intent is there, similar to Compounding. Likely, Vin would have sensed something weird about it, similar to when she tried to burn Sazed's Pewterminds in TFE. She probably still couldn't have accessed that power though. But, assuming that it were possible, she'd end up with some..."strange consequences".

I think that the reason Compounding via Hemalurgy doesn't work in modern Scadrial (I guess technically the entire Cosmere) is because Sazed is more Preservation-aligned in his current Intent, which is subconsciously reflected in Hemalurgy's mechanics, similar to how Harmonium is unstable due to Harmony's conflict of Intent; basically, Preservation is the dominant half of Harmony currently, and Hemalurgy reflects this by not trying to overtake and as fully control Hemalurgists as it once did. The pieces of Spiritweb in the spikes don't "reach out" as much as they used to, because they submit to the part of Preservation present (oh, tongue twister ) in the Hemalurgist's Spiritweb, hence the reason Identity contamination prevents Compounding- the spikes don't want to force themselves too much on the Preservation of the Hemalurgists, which restricts the maximum number of spikes a Hemalurgist can get powers from and prevents Identity-barriers from being breeched as easily as they were during the pre-Catacendre era. It's kind of cool actually, since this is very similar to what we see in RoW... It's also worth noting that this restriction of Hemalurgy is less likely to be a conscious decision on Sazed's part and more likely due to his Intent subconsciously "echoing" throughout his Shards, which impacts the entire system (the Ars. Arcanum talks about this at the end of TLM). Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble. Did I explain things coherently?

Yeah, Lerasium-level Allomancy can be very dangerous. It makes me wonder how powerful one could be if they had a Hemalurgic spike providing 10-50 times the power of a normal Misting (stacking together the power of multiple Mistings in a single spike).

Yeah, that's definitely one of the big "ifs" in this hypothesis of mine. I wonder if a natural Misting who blanked their own Identity with an Identityless F-alumin spike could still Compound with another spike even if that spike had an Identity and couldn't be blanked, since we've seen that you don't necessarily need to blank both the practitioner and the Investiture in question to make the two be able to interact (i.e., Wayne is able to tap an Identityless Goldmind in BoM).

I think that since you fuel normal Feruchemy with the Investiture of the Feruchemist that if a non-Scadrien the attribute would be fueled by whatever Investiuture composed the Feruchemist's Spiritweb. Compounding is directly fueled by Preservation (maybe Ruin if done via Hemalurgy) though, so attributes gained via Compounding would be composed entirely by that Investiture. Hmmm. It would be interesting to see what using other Shard's Investiture's to replace Allomancy would do. My instincts say that the powers would work normally, though there might be some "flavor" differences (Allomancy normally creates a warm "burning" sensation, but perhaps if you managed to hook a Misting to Honor's Invesiture they would instead feel pushed to act?). After all, Hemalurgy seems to do something similar to this if I'm correct; a piece of Spiritweb gets torn off of someone else and then gets converted to Ruin's Intent. The newly charged spike powers the Hemalurgist in the same way the donor had the power work for them. I do wonder about the Connection to Preservation being restored even if you heal through another Investiture though. I had assumed that since you used Investiture from another Shard that the Allomancer would have their Connection moved to that Shard (and that when they burned metals they would draw from that Shard instead of Preservation), but that is speculation only. Maybe, but I would guess that the Ruin Mistborn would have Spiritweb's composed of solely Ruin's Investiture (assuming they had children with another full Ruin individual) since that would be coded into their Spiritweb. I suppose it would depend on whether the individual's "code" for what Investiture their descendants had was the actual Investiture their Spiritweb was composed of or whether it is purely sDNA of some sort (it would also likely determine whether the Ruin Mistborn continued to draw from Preservation when burning metals or Ruin, actually). Very true. It's pretty much all speculation at this time, but it's enjoyable to have conversations with other 17th Sharders and debate and have thought experiments anyway

Ahhhh. Yes, that Inquisitor would have to have been a Mistborn naturally, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to use A-Atium, and we see that he clearly can. Also, I've wondered just how powerful a Mistborn who was created via one of the Lerasium beads found at the Well of Ascension would be. Good catch on the comparative power between the Inquisitor and Elend by the way Another feat of power we saw with Elend was in HoA when he matched the strength of a twelve-foot Koloss by flaring pewter, and a regular-strength Pewterarm only has roughly doubled strength and perhaps tripled strength when flaring. And since a Koloss essentially has two Blessings of Potency on top of having biceps thicker than a human's entire freaking torso, Elend's Allomantic strength must be huge. Yeah, that makes sense. Some would choose the ministry, but not enough for most Inquisitors to be Mistborn naturally (and as you pointed out, those who did choose to serve in the ministry would almost certainly become Inquisitors. I wonder if the non-Mistborn Inquisitors ever felt jealous of the others?). It seems I have found the Sherlock Holms of the 17th Shard 1. I think makes some sense. It does make me wonder why they would choose to get F-atium when they had a limited number of Keepers to spike and they knew there were other Feruchemical powers to be had that had a much more direct impact their total power (they at least knew about F-gold). Were they just experimenting, perhaps because the Lord Ruler hadn't told them all of Feruchemy's potential? 2. True. Vin would have probably burned the Inquisitors Atium spikes if she found any on them (which she didn't), and combining that with the fact that they could control Koloss they were likely all natural Mistborn as well. I wonder if she thought to check the Inquisitors that Marsh killed in TFE for Atium spikes?

You can regrow lost portions of Spiritweb, including the parts that allow access to the Metallic arts so long as you have enough Feruchemical gold (provided via Medallion in this case). Not quite the direction I meant to go in. I mean that one tries to fuel Invested healing (Feruchemical gold) with another type of Investiture, specifically Ruin in this case. Then you deliberately damage your Spiritweb by removing the bit of Preservation in it via Hemalurgy. You then heal the damage with Feruchemical gold that is powered by Ruin's Investiture (provided by Compounding using Hemalurgic spikes after someone figured out how to Compound via Hemalurgy). Your Spiritweb is now entirely made up of Ruin's Investiture because you used Ruin's Investiture to graft on a new piece of Spiritweb. I don't know all the implications of this, but I listed a few in my original post. Also, when the quote says you can't heal yourself with the magic in Warbreaker, I think that it means that Awakening specifically can't heal you, not Breaths, since you can fuel different magic systems with other Investitures. I could be wrong, however. Hope that cleared things up a bit

Lol, true enough

I had an idea before where you could give someone access to Feruchemical gold via Malwish Medallion tech who wasn't a Scadrien, say, a Nalthian, they could store health that would be composed of their Shard's Intent since their Spiritweb is composed of that Investiture. Then if a Misting were to have their power removed via Hemalurgy, they could use the Nalthian's health to grow back their power (assuming it's Identity-free). The resulting power would be composed of Endowment rather than Preservation, and could lead to some interesting ramifications. Now I wonder what would happen if someone did that, but used Hemalurgically Compounded health- health fueled directly by Ruin and its Investiture. The Misting's Spiritweb would be composed entirely (or at least almost entirely) of Ruin's Investiture. Would their descendants have Ruin-fueled Allomancy? Would the powers be skewed somewhat by the new Intent of power? What about their interaction with Hemalurgy? Could this perhaps be a way to overcome limit to the number of spikes a human can gain powers from, since the spikes wouldn't have any Preservation to bow before? What if you spiked a Nalthian's Breath from them and healed it back with Ruin's Investiture? Could they give that Breath to someone else, potentially creating Heighteings, only with Ruin's Investiture- which could lead to new insights to Hemalurgic practice due to inherent knowledge that comes with the Heightenings? So many more possibilities than I had originally thought.

I had come up with an idea before on how a Trueself Ferring could blank their Identity while having their power taken Hemalurgically, which would blank the Identity of the spike. The power could be given to other Metalborn, who in turn could blank their Identity to make Compounding and combining Invested charges a viable option with those spikes. This would require that you have willing donors, however, as you can't reliably force someone you're stealing a power from to blank their Identity. I'm now wondering if perhaps I've been overthinking the problem. If you gave a Hemalurgic spike that provided access to Feruchemical aluminum to a Hemalurgist, they could blank their Identity (and that of their spikes, presumably) to make Compounding possible for as long as they blanked their Identity- it wouldn't matter if the spike had an Identity tied to it, since you could blank it anyway. This wouldn't make it possible to stack Investiture in a single spike (no supercharged Hemalurgy ) and you'd need an additional spike to make the Compounding viable (a legitimate concern when you're dealing with a max of three, maybe four or five spikes if you don't mind Shardic intervention), but without the need of a willing donor, this feels like it would be a much more achievable solution to the problem of Compounding via Hemalurgy. I suppose you could upgrade this if you had multiple people working together; a natural Misting (say, a gold Misting) or someone willing to take another Hemalurgic spike could take the Feruchemical side of what they wanted to Compound and Feruchemical aluminum, then they could blank their Identity and Compound large stores of the desired attribute. Since the attribute is now Identity-free, the Hemalurgist's buddies could access those stores for their own use (only one Compounder is needed for the group assuming that you aren't going to be needing a constant intake of whatever power you're using).

Good points made about needing Atium. With that being the case, I think it very likely that spikes providing A-Atium would be required for most, if not all Steel Inquisitors- it would likely be considered part of the "basic" set along with Allomantic steel, iron, and pewter (would be embarrassing for people to find out that your super powered Inquisitors couldn't do even the most basic Steeljump or take a punch from a Thug, no?). However, we do know that some Inquisitors had F-Atium, and as we established earlier, it seems very unlikely that Rashek would want them to discover the secret of Compounding, particularly about F-Atium since it would create an opening for one of his most powerful servants to kill him. I suppose that Ruin could have given those spikes to the Inquisitors though after he was freed though, which would explain how they got them. I agree with you on Bendal being a natural Mistborn, since he had noticablely stronger A-pewter than Kelsier, and Kar was probably a natural Seeker by default. I'm curious as to why you think the Vetitan Inquisitor was Mistborn though (It's been a while since I read the original trilogy though- could you tell me where to find that Inquisitor again?). Ah, that makes sense. Money does makes the world go round, and I do tend to forget that many people are faithful enough to their religion to sacrifice for it (which is kind of ironic, actually, seeing as how I'm ussually faithful enough to sacrifice for my religion ).