Wonko the Sane

I'm not nearly as dedicated as the rest of you, so I have little to add. That said, I'd like to point out that while figgldygrak sounds like a nonsense word, gibletish does not. It stands out as out of place, somehow. I'm not completely convinced it's an anagram, but I am dead certain that there is more to that word that meets the eye. So, you know, keep it up.

First of all, I agree with the previously made argument that for there to be any contest, the sparker's ability to react correctly must be superb. So for the purposes of this post, I'm going to assume that they're both perfect at it. I believe that the entire battle hinges on the seer's (natural) reflexes. At their heart, both metals allow you to react to new information faster: zinc by reducing mental lag, atium by actually giving you the information earlier. With infinite mental speed, the sparker's reaction time is reduced to zero. So the question is, can the seer reduce their time to less than zero? or do their unenhanced reflexes limit them enough that even with advance warning, they can't react fast enough? Since all other factors are being held as equal, reaction time must be the deciding element. On the subject of splitting shadows, I believe that while there would only be two shadows at any one time, the literally instantaneous reflexes of the sparker would ensure that old shadows disappear and new ones reappear at a blinding rate, which would still make the sparker difficult to track.

Honor isn't about what's right or wrong. If I swear allegiance to an evil overlord, then later forswear my oath and join the side of good, I am still acting dishonorably. Honor is about keeping promises, about deciding the rules by which to live your life and then living by them. Szeth is absolutely the most honorable character; honorable even to a most egregious fault.

Assuming that's possible. It seems like there are some as-yet-unknown limitations on Soulcasting, as it was only capable of producing barracks in a certain shape.

The word used isn't "opposite," it's "opposed." Dockson was "opposed" to the Lord Ruler's domination of the Final Empire. Would you consider him equal to the Lord Ruler in power? The question was intentionally vague to avoid a RAFO. All we know is that, prior to the Shattering, there was someone or something that "opposed" Adonalsium, and that it has survived, in some form, to the present day. Maybe it was an equal and opposite force. Maybe it was a person. Maybe it was an unusually opinionated bit of pocket lint. A strong argument could actually be made that it was the Seventeenth Shard, or perhaps Hoid. Brandon has recently referred to Adonalsium as "he." This can probably be taken as confirmation that Adonalsium was a person - or at least, that he had personifiable characteristics. Therefore, even if the phrase "power of creation" can be taken as meaning that Adonalsium was basically a bigger Shard named Creation (which is in no way certain), you don't have to be his opposite to oppose his opinions. I don't have to be aligned with Ruin to be against Preservation's decision to sacrifice herself in Hero of Ages. This decision was not based on some core ideal of Preservation, but rather on Vin's own personality. The book even mentions that it was a very Ruin-ish thing to do. My overall point is that just because something opposed Adonalsium, doesn't mean it has to be his the Yin to his Yang.

I don't think that the concept of the safehand needs to teach readers any lesson, nor do I believe that characters need to come to the realization that it's wrong. It's not a metaphor against discrimination in the real world; it simply presents an aspect of society as it is. This issue highlights one of my favorite aspects of Brandon's writing. He never pushes any opinion into his work; he merely presents the world as he sees it - or at least, as his characters see it. Rather than comment on how things should or shouldn't be, he simply allows you to better understand the way things are. As a result, his stories and settings ring far truer to me than many others, where they are contrived to support a particular viewpoint.

Yes, there was: that's why it's such a huge scandal that Jasnah, a heretic, possesses one. No one knows where she got it, but it is fairly common knowledge that she has one. The ardentia are not happy about this. If you look, it is implied that they have made numerous attempts to reacquire it from her by asking nicely, offering enormous amounts of wealth in trade, or simply trying to stealing it. Remember when Jasnah finds that Shallan has been talking to an ardent? Her first reaction is to ask whether Kabsal has asked Shallan to steal Jasnah's Soulcaster yet. As it turns out, It was fairly easy for her to get her hands on a Soulcaster; all she needed was a few gems, some metal, and a reliably discreet craftsman. This is her actual secret, which I believe is the source of your confusion. It's true that no one knows that she is a Surgebinder; that she can Soulcast without a fabrial. The fake Soulcaster was a part of this deception, allowing her to use her powers in public without revealing their actual source. Now, that said, it's entirely possible that Taravangian, with his epic-scale conniving and scheming, is, in fact, completely aware of the truth. He clearly has at least some understanding of Surgebinding, as Szeth's Windrunner-esque abilities do not catch him off guard.

@king of nowhere: Actually, if you look back, I think that Moogle answered that question fairly satisfactorily. Additionally, I wasn't actually asking for straight answers - I was surprised to get one. I was just asking for everyone else's opinions.

First, I have quotes, to appease the forum gods. Not all of these are expressly relevant to my point, but they all seem to concern the topic, so I thought I'd bring them up. Anyway, my interpretation of the quotes about compounding is that compounding doesn't actually make Feruchemy end-positive; it enables you to use an already end-positive investiture - Allomancy - in new and exciting ways. Basically, it creates a new metal, which can be burned for an effect that mimics the Feruchemical attribute that you have stored. You're not multiplying the stored attribute; you're getting a bunch of Preservation's power to act as though it was the stored attribute. The difference is subtle, but significant. If our theoretical Feruchemy-Hemalurgy interaction functions like compounding - and there is absolutely no reason to suggest that it wouldn't - then, just as in compounding, the Feruchemical charge will act only as a blueprint, changing the spike into a new kind of metal. It could not provide power for the interaction - that has to come from the normal place. In other words, your feru-spike would still have to be driven through an appropriate bind point before it could be used Hemalurgically. Storing an attribute in a spike would basically just change the spike so that it now steals that attribute. Additionally, the first quote brings up the excellent point that Feruchemical charge retains information about who stored it. On some fundamental level, my weight and your weight are not the same thing - and what's more, you cannot use my weight. To me, this seems to imply some heavy restrictions on our interaction. My best guess is that it would end up working as follows: Feruchemist A stores some of "Weight A" in an iron spike. Feruchemist B cannot draw from this ironmind, because Feruchemist B can only draw "Weight B." Now, this new feru-spike is now capable of stealing the attribute you have stored... but that attribute isn't just "Weight," it's "Weight A." So, in order to hemalurgically charge this spike, Feruchemist A would have to drive it through his own heart. Let's say he does this. He has now created a "Weight A" spike - and the only person who could benefit from such a spike would be Feruchemist A. Thus, all in all, the interaction would be useless.

Thank you, by the way, for answering my question. I honestly didn't expect that to happen; I was just hoping to get everyone's take on it. It does raise a few other questions, though. For example, how fast is this recycling process? If it's instantaneous, it could be used for FTL information transfer. Additionally - although I'm dead certain that this has been asked before, even without checking - it begs the question, at what point does swallowed matter get assimilated into a person's weight for Feruchemical iron purposes? Oh! And how about spikes? Do they add to your weight? If they do, I have an incredible idea: Step 1: Be a Skimmer. Step 2: Find a helpless victim. Any fool will do, but I find it's more satisfying to use a mortal enemy. Step 3: Buy metal. Buy a LOT of metal. Step 4: Construct a length of metal several miles long. Step 5: Use your megaspike to hemalurgically transfer some trait or other from helpless victim to you. Step 6: Start storing about 50% of your SEVERAL HUNDRED TONS of weight in an enormous chunk of iron. Step 7: Wait a while. If you used a mortal enemy as your helpless victim, you can amuse yourself by staring at his blood-soaked corpse and laughing maniacally. Step 8: Remove megaspike. Step 9: Find something you don't like. Stand on it. Crush it. Step 10: Repeat as needed. In all seriousness, the above plan might actually be possible.

BG2? I'm not sure I follow. Wonko the Sane is a minor character in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Trilogy* by Douglas Adams. His primary character trait is a belief that the rest of the world is completely and totally insane. The following is a quote, which I have abridged for relevance: The character is also known for his claims of being frequently visited by angels with golden beards and green wings, who wear Dr. Scholl's sandals and ride on little scooters. *This is not a mistake. There are five books in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy.

This question has been bugging me for a long time, and no one else seems to be bothered by it. When an allomancer burns a sample of metal, it is 'used up', and cannot be further used for the Metallic Arts. All this is well and good, but what exactly happens to it? where do the actual, physical molecules go? Are they converted into an unnamed, allomantically inert substance? Or are they actually annihilated? Let me posit a strange example: Kim the mistborn swallows 20 lbs of copper. I realize that this would be difficult, but Kim is very determined (and more than a little insane). She then stands on one end of a scale, the other end being weighted to balance her perfectly. Then, she starts burning her copper supply. This is going to take a while, so let's leave her there for a while. While we wait, I want to bring up a few points. I would have suggested Kim use aluminum or duralumin, except that there is no guarantee that the process is the same. Nevertheless, I would like to know where the metal goes in these cases, as well. I would also like to bring up the special case of atium. WoB confirms that when atium is burned, the metal returns to Ruin's Shardpool above the Pits of Hathsin. This probably implies that the metal does, in fact, vanish from the allomancer's stomach. However, we must remember that atium is an extraordinarily atypical substance, and quite possibly functions in a completely different manner from other metals. At this point, we come back to Kim, who has now been continuously burning copper for several days. Has the scale been unbalanced? That is, has the mass of the copper been subtracted from her weight? If not, what substance has taken the place of the twenty pounds of copper in her stomach? If so, where has it gone? An additional thought: what about the volume of the huge lump of copper? would Kim's stomach visibly shrink throughout this process? Note: I realize that this is a work of fantasy, and that physics will have to be bent and broken in places. However, "a wizard did it" is hardly Brandon's style, and, if possible, I would prefer a more satisfying explanation.

There has to be more to it than acting against your own Intent. In the Vin vs. Ruin example -- which I think we have all agreed is a prime example of how not to Splinter a Shard -- Vin does something very anti-Preservation, and while it ends up killing Vin, Preservation comes out of it fully intact. However there is the question of what would have happened if Sazed hadn't been there to pick the Shards up. Perhaps this is all that's required to Splinter a Shard: to leave it without a guiding consciousness. Certainly, every Splintered Shard we've seen thus far is also dead.

You're right; I had forgotten that. A part of my half-recollected argument still stands, though: I believe that the Arelish translation of Aons is only partially relevant to their magical significance. Many of them, like Aon Ien, mean things linguistically that have absolutely nothing to do with their effect when drawn by an Elantrian. But then, there are others, such as Aon Daa, whose effect does somewhat align with their meaning. From this, I suppose we must infer that, at least originally, the Aons matched up with their meanings fairly well, and any discrepancy is likely due to distortion over time. On another note, that's a terrible idea for a language! Are we saying that it was impossible to say 'cow' until someone discovered the word for it? For all we know, it's still impossible!

I may be wrong, as I unfortunately don't have the time to find a quote right now, but I believe that WoB has said that AonDor and Elantrians did not exist prior to the Splintering of the Selian Shards. If this is the case, I find it very unlikely that Aona had a hand in the development of Aonic. It seems to me that the magic system spontaneously developed around the language, much like the Dakhor arts developed around "ancient Fjordell characters." Additionally, I seem to recall that the given translations for Aons are an invention of Arelish culture, and have in fact evolved and shifted over time. I do not believe they have much - if any - bearing on the Aons' applications in AonDor.

You have to keep context in mind. Just before he declares what would happen, "were most mistborn to burn it," he discusses the fact that "there are ways to do really cool things with lerasium that I don't see how anyone would know." To me, this is saying that most of the time, lerasium just has the instinctual default effect of making mistborn stronger - but, if you know what you're doing and have a strong grasp of the realmatics of the situation, it can do a number of other interesting things. There also remains my argument that if more lerasium doesn't make a stronger mistborn, than less lerasium shouldn't make a weaker one - implying that a single bead of lerasium can produce an army. The only explanation for a maximum mistborn strength that does not include this broken possibility is that more lerasium does induce more power, but only up to an arbitrarily imposed limit. If we accept this, there must be an explanation of exactly what force imposes this limit, and why that specific power level is the maximum. So far as I can tell, no one has yet addressed this. the closest they have come is to propose that excess power simply leaks away, without the slightest clue as to why this might happen.

We absolutely know what the minimum threshold of investiture to be considered a Sliver is: It seems that basically, someone is considered a Sliver if at one point they had enough investiture to be considered a Shard. The Returned are not Shards, ergo they do not become Slivers when they give up their divine breaths.

I don't think it's pretentious at all. Imagine the following scenario: Various people, over time, become fairly Realmatically aware. Eventually, they find each other and group up. Then they realize how puny and insignificant they are. The fact of the matter, as they quickly discover, is that there are sixteen people who decide the fate of the cosmere, and that everyone else is irrelevant. They decide that they do not like this situation. They come up with a plan: while they realize that they could never directly hope to contend with the power of a Shard, they think that, perhaps, if they all band together, they might nevertheless be able to work towards making a difference in the universe. With this in mind, they resolve enter this cosmic game as a new (albeit weaker) player - a seventeenth Shard, as it were, peer to the sixteen if not in power, then at least in influence. Keep in mind that they don't call themselves followers of the Seventeenth Shard; they call themselves members, meaning that the term describes the entire organization - that they, as a collective, are the Seventeenth Shard. Would it have made sense if Zane had called himself a member of Ruin? Regardless of whether my interpretation is accurate, I find it highly unlikely that the term Seventeenth Shard refers to only the organization's leader, Kelsier or otherwise.

This is reaching back a few pages (but in this thread, what isn't), but I'd like to contest the claim that a lerasium-created mistborn could not benefit from instinctual use of more lerasium. Keep in mind that the process of becoming a lerasium savant is one and the same with the process of Ascension. If I recall correctly, Brandon's words were "that's basically what Ascension is," implying that the two processes are not merely equivalent - they are the exact same thing. This means that when Vin is takes in the mists, she is essentially burning vast quantities of gaseous lerasium. The effect of this (apart from becoming a god)? She notices an enormous boost in her allomantic strength, which continues to increase as she takes in more of the mists. Before the end of it, she has become powerful enough to collapse the largest structure in Luthadel. If, say, Elend were to burn more lerasium, I feel that it would have a similar effect. An alternative defense: If the mistborn created by a sample of lerasium has the same power regardless of how large the sample, are we saying that the number of full-power mistborn you can create with a single bead of lerasium is limited only by the number of flakes you can shave off of it? No? Well, if less lerasium creates a weaker mistborn, it should follow that more lerasium creates a stronger one.

Well, we know that Elantris radiated fertility, and that when it fell, crops throughout Arelon suffered. I have no idea why it would intensify near the Chasm, though.

From Cultivation and Honor, we have clear evidence that the Shards had at least some choice in choosing their planet. Their intents have almost nothing to do with each other, and with a one in fifteen chance, it seems unlikely that each would end up randomly paired with the exact person they would have chosen. Additionally, we know that Odium goes on vacation all the time. If he didn't like Braize, it seems like he could easily go somewhere else and live there instead. In fact, regardless of where they originally landed, all of the Shards apparently have the choice to set up shop wherever they want. Now, Word of Brandon tells us that Preservation and Ruin had almost no choice but to settle together. What if that doesn't refer to a literal compulsion, but to a rational decision (as in, "I have no choice but to go to work today")? Perhaps they could easily have settled anywhere they wanted, but the alternative to settling together was so unappealing that it really wasn't an option at all. Remember the sorts of things that happened when the two became unbalanced by even a little bit? Either the world stagnated and decayed for a millennium, or it suddenly rushed headlong into the apocalypse. Basically, both of them knew that they would ruin everything, given the chance, so they needed someone they could count on to be an absolutely obnoxious jerk and prevent them from messing with anything - someone who would, just out of principle, systematically oppose literally any decision they made. Had the Shard they chosen to settle down with been any less opposite, occasionally their intents would align, and these moments of freedom would gradually accumulate. Thus, in a manner of speaking, they would have 'had no choice' but to settle together - even though they were actually free to go wherever they pleased.

I'd like to add that many of the effects achieved in the book would be impossible if Allomancy was directed only from the Allomancer's center of mass. It seems likely that the Allomancer has a limited degree of control over the exact point from which she pushes and pulls, but that exerting this control consciously is relatively difficult. Instead, It would more often remain in the hands of the "instinctual" control of all the little variables in Allomancy that the books are so fond of referencing.

I like the idea that a Shard takes a considerable amount of time and effort to splinter. It would help to explain what the heck Odium is still doing on Roshar.

Endowment is about gifts, both from itself and from others. As such, I feel like Endowment simply shows the potentially-Returned the future, and makes it possible for them to give themselves toward some cause. If Endowment were to choose how this gift was to be given, it wouldn't be a gift at all. For example, I think it was absolutely possible, theoretically speaking, that a person could have Returned for the express purpose of preventing Lightsong from healing the God King. On another note, the dying delirium quotes are not so easily summed up as that. In some ways, it feels as though each individual experiences a fundamentally different effect. Consider the following: In each of these cases, it is fairly evident that the speakers have experienced some sort of phenomenon, but each retains not only their identity but also full consciousness of their physical environment. Furthermore, the first quote is almost definitely not a vision of the future: it appears to be a description of a Cryptic followed by one of Shadesmar. I get the feeling that whatever is going on, it is far more complex than a vision of the future or possession by some transient being.

You're leaving out the fact that, in Sazed's hands, the bead could have created an all-metal compounder in the vein of the Lord Ruler. It's true that they didn't have a complete understanding of compounding (heck, we still don't), but they did work out the basic principle in the epilogue of book 1. If Marsh could figure out how to do it (he achieves immortality through atium compounding), I would bet Sazed could. EDIT: Never mind -- you were leaving that out. Miyabi addressed it. All the same, I would risk a potentially corrupt dictator to stave off the apocalypse. And WoB says that a mistborn who burns lerasium gets stronger. I don't think that there's an upper limit.