Tamriel Wolfsbaine

My personal favorite combo here. I really like this one. However I think it also depends on how chromium fortune works. My favorite theory is in gut instinct. Everything you feel to be true turns out to your favor when tapping while everything your spirit feels to be true works against you while storing. This combo could be wicked helpful if you can work past those feelings that are taunting you to drop the bubble and make the worst step of your life. Also super expensive. Bendalloy isn't cheap. While a minute or two inside is the same as a couple hours outside you are still blowing through an incredible amount of money to make it happen. Likely much safer. Get a primer cube and a buddy. Have your buddy chain you up and then activate the primer cube on your position. You can store for days while begging for him to let you out in some ultra bad fortune trip while he waits a couple.minutes until.the cube is done draining. No chance for you to stop the bendalloy burn on a badly miscalculated fortune dump either. Another fun one would be A-tin and F-steel. Being able to bullet time plus have some savant like senses would be fun.

I think that is a holdup I have as well. Water from bendalloy seems really efficient to use bendalloy for. Drink more store more. If it is only storing the hydration being the building blocks of all electrolyte balance and is being pulled from cells and the blood itself, wouldn't being a gold compounder far outweigh the bendalloy for aether uses?

Precisely. The easiest answer is "investiture makes up for it", but I think that it would be a fun thing to read personally. There was no mention of salts that I am aware of from Twinsoul. Although it was all written from Marasi pov so we may not see it. I thought that the smartest take on any episode of ALONE was the 10lb salt rock. Straight up that would be my #1 pick. You are going to lose salts eventually one way or another... either you will sweat them out or pee them out. And its not just sodium that you have to worry about. Magnesium and potassium imbalances will off you just as quickly, although they are a lot trickier to solve via oral intake and don't flush out quite as easily either. I had an interesting discussion with the doc I was was working with recently about the challenges of potassium imbalances. Just because the electrolyte panel comes back saying its high doesn't necessarily mean it where you want it. When someone goes down it can shift out of the cells and get carried around the blood stream which makes it read high but at a cellular level it is low and the gradient is off. If you pee it off you actually end up with a hypokalemia instead of the hyperkalemia it appeared to be at the initial labs. When I do fasts beyond a day it becomes a daily listening to my body and adjusting the salts. Just water... I will feel like garbage in a day. Start with a bit of salt with the water and things go well for longer. Eventually the charlie horses happen and then its time for some nosalt (potassium) and a pinch of Epsom salt (magnesium). But investiture protecting its user can handwave all of the little nuances away. Giving us essentially the idea that water ingestion alone can do it. In which case why add the time constraint and not just say that they are strictly going after the H2O. You could play around with the "hyper(insert electrolyte here)" syndromes as side effects. Simplifying it to eyes being sunken in is neat for a visual. What would actually happen to your body is muscle spasms and twitches as well as cardiac arrhythmias. Maybe not as fun to read about someone riding sand ribbons who gets a gnarly charlie horse mid scene... I think it would be really cool if a bendalloy ferring who understood all the nuances of hydration were able to leverage them to become more efficient at storing. Which all brings me to the investiture handwaving again. The time constraint from water ingestion to usability will hopefully be explored in some other books. I think the Lift example is solid however, the spores on Lumar react quickly and violently to strictly water in every form. A drop of water or spit or blood should all work about the same (I don't know if any body being torn to bits bleeding everywhere in one of the seas sets off a mini bomb of spores but if spit works then blood should work too I think.) Why wouldn't they just draw it in as you ingest it?

Personally I like this explanation more. But then it make me wonder what of electrolytes? A camelbak filled with water would only do so much for hydration. The electrolytes that build it up would be a balance that is much harder to play with for aether. Also perhaps Aethers work differently given they are a totally different mechanism seperate from the shards and Adonalsium themselves? Lift and Sand mastery seem really close but both are derived from Shards of the same one god. If the Aethers truly are older than the shattering their mechanisms may be copied by certain shards on the surface but be different beneath. Either way I am sure "investiture fills in the gaps" is the answer to any inconsistencies with physiology. My same gripe with what exactly cadmium is doing as there is literally too much going on in the body to simplify to just oxygenation blood cells. Investiture fixing the difference is the only answer. Plus we are seeing that feruchemy has a lot more than meets the eye for a few metals. While storing hydration from the cells could be one answer... simply storing the fuel to hydrate and then investiture filling the gaps of all of the physiological changes needed to turn water usable could be something else. Twinsoul's camelbak could be argued either way... just needing to slowly refuel as he is going. I always envisioned it as a quick battery source that he could use so he didn't have to suffer from the dehydration more. I would say so much of the water we drink gets wasted and not used in hydrating ourselves that a bendalloy ferring becomes even stronger than I first thought.... a metalmind of a genuine weeks worth of hydration could be thousands of pounds worth of water consumption stored in an earring. Perhaps keeping oneself artificially dehydrated more via storing would supercharge the bodies efforts in rehydration from the salts and water that they consume. I would say that the camelbak should be mixed with snake juice (water and a selection of salts and other electrolytes). Bendalloy for hydration would do so much better once era 3 and 4 come around and the understanding of cellular physiology. Then maximizing efforts to ingest the correct buildingblocks for hydration will become more important. A long living spore eater would be a fun character to explore in my opinion. Balancing the efforts to longevity vs quality of life would be an interesting story for my tasted. Probably dreadfully boring to the vast majority of consumers though :(. I will settle for more aetherbound action as well. They will probably show us more of what the aethers are capable of anyway.

I am always thinking about interactions between the arts. On today's menu is the spore eater. Ulaam says that they are incapable of rational thought and that it is always fatal. What are some ways you think that one could extend their life if they were inflicted by it? The most painfully obvious option, as in the case of everything Aether related in my opinion is bendalloy compounding. While bendalloy is expensive and it will likely get to where you can't give the aether enough even through that method, how long do you think one could last? Years, decades, longer? In this case you simply compound enough water to keep it satiated. What about connection manipulation. The idea of it being rabid and insatiable, incapable of rational thought... do you think connection play though anymeans could allow a person to reason with the aether? Same line of thinking, what about emotional allomancy? Healing is the next line of thought. I sort of think that it could work like a less effective water source as found in bendalloy compounding. Simply healing the effects of dehydration and offering it the ability to feed off of that. OR... would healing simply heal the spore out of you like healing a parasite? Along those same lines, what about abilities that make it so you can't get sick? Like 5th+ heightening and Elantrian? Would you simply never be able to become a spore eater? What of someone at the 4th heightening? Gaining large effects but it bot being perfected until later? Maybe you would not be able to tell you were thirsty until the aether drank straight from the biochromatic breaths first? Perhaps combining some of these could offer a nearly full life and beyond... a bendalloy compounder who can supplement a thousand breaths along the way as well? In the end it is probably much safer to be an aetherbound as opposed to a spore eater. I like the automatic defense system that spore eaters have though. Maybe a seasoned aetherbound could experience similar benefits of automatically being protected by their primal aether?

Mistborn 1 spoilers:

Mistborn spoilers. Isn't this basically the ?

Because I really like this topic and have started thinking heavily on copper compounding I will leave this here. This is from the Mistborn Adventure Game: Alloy of Law pg 186 for copper compounder stunts. While the MAG is not directly cannon I do believe that compounding copper is something that hasn't been brought up yet as a potential option for this. I personally believe that compounding can bring with it new resonances the way any twinborn pairings can. We don't know if compounding copper simply duplicates memories or makes them more clear or engraves them more permanently on your memory but I imagine compounding copper could unlock these doors really well. While physical mimicary isn't storing muscle memory, and in fact it does state here that there would be dangers of trying to mimic physical feats your body is incapable of (just cause you can replicate the pewter arms wall punch form perfectly doesn't mean you will be as fast or strong at it... and it doesn't protect your hand from shattering on the brick). I do think that this sort of Neuro hardwiring to get motions and forms down would probably work well and have fun applications for a copper compounder. In fact... a copper compounder is my current fan fic character and he uses copper knuckledusters which hold all of his memories of fighting and training. I'm playing it that so long as he stores and burns constantly he basically has an eidetic memory. (If your playing a compounder you might as well pull a Miles and constantly be storing and burning). The only things he forgets he does on purpose and he keeps those skills and memories hidden away. His opening scene is him inspecting multiple identical sets of copper knuckles which all hold the memories of his training and experience in pugalism with them. He can ditch a set when needed and have stored his entire memory of anything illicit that may have transpired while using them. He has memories and copies of memories hidden all over the place and picking and choosing what he wants to remember is his entire game. Does that mean his muscles forget the ability to fight? I had thought yes but maybe not. Which I can enjoy either way. If he could forget the ability to fight and have his muscles forget then he can instantly become unsuspecting as someone capable of doing any of the things he may be suspected of doing. However if he can't forget the muscle memory then he could just turn into Jason Bourne and be totally shocked by himself as he opens a can on someone.

Yes it would make him a gold compounder. I think that the heat from the explosion likely ruined any metalminds he may have been wearing. He was basically vaporized with everything else. Even if he could... I don't think that Wayne would want to. His entire arc was coming to a nice close. He had acccepted all of the ladies loving ladies more than him. The Kandra loving harmony more than him. The woman he wanted to apologize hated him for years and years. Part of what made Wayne a good gold ferring on screen is how much he could store... I think a person would have to not enjoy themselves a lot to spend weeks on the verge of self inflicted organ failure and sepsis. For this reason, gold feruchemy is epic but it honestly is not my top choice. Healing from minor injuries would be awesome but being as sick as I can push myself to store that health would be awful and I just wouldnt do it enough to make any good storage. I think Wayne was at the point of accepting himself and he looked at that sacrifice as his way of making things right. To heal through it all would be cheating... And I think that is saying something even for Wayne. He would have some snarky comment about robbing justice or something. So even if he, and all of his metalminds, were not being vaporized beyond saving I dont think he would have wanted to compound and appear. A small theme I noticed was Waynes thinking about how Wax didnt even know him. I think that Wax waiting for his friend to show up like it was a big joke Dumb and Dumberer style was more proof that Wax didnt really know his friend as well as he thought.

I love iron feruchemy. If I had to take iron allomancy it would mean nearly nothing at all. Hands in the air for iron compounding energy generation possibilities? Maybe? Cadmium is my least favorite allomantic metal and I dont do anything that really takes my breath away anyways. So I will say cadmium. @Quantus has a good argument for nicrosil being garbo for a non cosmere native haha.

I think is all depends on who is invading who. I will say that so far as I know Roshar is poopoo at invading anyone because so much of their magic is tied to their home world. Just getting stormlight off world will be tricky, that says very little about transporting that bond around the cosmere. I will be sad when Roshar gets a magic hand wavey answer to this and suffers no ill effects from it though. In light of that likely being the case, I think anti magic is going to be a massive deciding factor in it. Both systems are finding weaknesses to themselves, how well those weaknesses are able to be exploited by the other will be a big deciding factor. I think that the Tower giving infinite stormlight makes Roshar impossible to actually win over. Even if you beat all of the radiants back and built an aluminum box around them... eventually some bondsmith will just poof into existance the answer anyway. It would be interesting to see how a trellium / harmonium bomb would effect the Tower... if it could break the infinite healing / magic usage glitch that it is. I also think that limiting either planet to just their system is wishful thinking. We already see a large powerhouse from Scadrial combining systems from around the cosmere to do some really cool stuff. Primer cubes with leeching powers fueled by pure dor will be an anti magic of its own and the fact that you could probably build them into ammunition makes it even spookier. But can you send ballistics to leech anyone against walking lazer beams? Which brings me to this... what makes division special if lightweavers are going to get lazers anyway? Lazer beams out of hands are lame change my mind. I love Scadrial in sci-fi times for its mobility of magic. Same reason I like awakening. The ability to be powerful no matter what planet you step on is a massive advantage. No hacking needed. You have allomancy? You have metal? You have power. Anything short of handwavy shenanigans is going to put Roshar at a disadvantage and I personally grow tired of the answer "because bondsmith said so".

Okay... so I just saw the trailer for the new Planet of the Apes movie and his staff almost looks like a cattle prod... which made me think of games with electric powered weapons. Of course that got my mind thinking, how could I make something like that in the cosmere? I guess the first question is.... could you create a one shot zapping cattle prod commanded to "Destroy Evil"? Some serious touch of death vibes here? What about a supercharged plasma cutting sword or something? Brass compounder with a tungsten blade funneling heat through the weapon? Feruchemy protects the ferring as they would be hot enough to heat the weapon in the first place... And Tungsten can withstand temps above 6000 degrees f before melting at 6200f. So I assume you could swing that bad boi around and pretty well melt through everything. Is this the closest to a lightsaber Scadrial can get? I am sure you could make just about anything with the right aons but I have yet to read that book. Please share any thoughts. Extra points if you can make a hammer or staff that is lightning charged.

@Trusk'our @Duxredux @alder24 @Koloss17 I admit I do my fair share of building upon other ideas and I am not the greatest at citing my sources.... So apologies for any offense. You all present great ideas on mechanisms that work and in my shower thoughts I build upon them heavily... @Duxredux the layers of metals became a thing of obsession as I considered what life would be like if a mistborn ended up on... SA spoilers: Though I must admit I am backing off my shard presence a good bit. Still thinking about it from time to time. Warbreaker spoilers: Back on topic! I like the idea of some sort of GI feeding tube but I think getting the drip rate to do what you want would be difficult. I think @Trusk'our is onto something with the spring loaded idea. I really don't know how much metal you need to be effective. I always imagined little metallic shavings being drank down and it wasn't until the last couple years that I thought about big ol' chunks of metal being ingested at once. Something I think would work well would be small stents and ports inside the skin with a spring loaded device. Only it would be spring loaded on a wound up spool of smaller gauge wire. (Maybe the bigger gauges for faster burning stuff? Clearly pewter should be larger gauge than duralumin). You load up your spool of wire and that length of wire is always inside that catheter / stent. I think you could use a more mesh like stent to allow for a lot of physical contact to the metal through this method. As you slow burn it the spring keeps some constant pressure pushing against that stent (it would have to be blocked at the deepest end as a stopping point). The spool would continually feed to the end of the port / stent / catheter and if you burn duralumin it would use the entire length of wire that is in the person at once. If the burn of duralumin truly is instant then it would be cut off after that and the next length of wire would be shoved into and down to the end of the port afterwords. Thinking of how we utilize small packs and pouches and ports in medicine already I think a belt of these, encased in aluminum of course, would make for an awesome mistborn accessory. You could put it anywhere really but a spool of metal would last a long long time. You could carry some extra spring loaded cartridges too and reload them simply by opening the aluminum casing and snapping a new spool into place. How large or small the sizing of these wires would need to be is up for debate. I genuinely have no idea how much of any metal is needed for any effect. Talking needle sizes I imagine a 12 gauge needle is 2mm. A BB is about 4.5mm in diameter giving it a volume of 0.0477cc. You would only need a port and stent 0.38cm long to give you the same volume as an ingested BB worth of metal. If you extended that 12gauge port down to 2cm you would have a volume of 0.25cc in the body at a time, or the equivalent of 5.27 BBs worth of metal X. If you wanted to take it to the extreme. Central lines have catheters 2.3mm in diameter and up to 16cm in length which would give a potential volume of 2.65cc the equivalent to 55.5 bbs at once. I don't think humans would enjoy having any sort of stent that large with constant pushing pressure from a spring but this could be taken to the extreme by some other lifeforms on Scadrial should they acquire a chunk of Lerasium. Just another reason to be terrified of a rogue Kandra mistborn. They could set up a system like this throughout their body which would be spooky for anyone who wished to fight them. For your average joe mistborn trying to create something like this... I think a few cm would be more than tolerable if kept fairly superficial and I think it would be well enough concealable to make it possible. You could go further with thinner wire and it would be easier to spool up but may malfunction if the spring isn't perfect. Meanwhile, with the thicker gauge wire you could probably make a much more reliable system so long as the wire doesn't become so thick that it can't be wound up. I don't know where the ideal points are and odds are that would come down to each metals properties anyways. I don't know if you need a setup like this for more than a couple of metals anyways. For sure one spool with duralumin (some testing to see how much you need at a time to instantly burn the other metals you are using). I would say two or more spools of pewter for my personal choice and one or two of steel. I think most other metals I would choose to burn in the normal way, ingested. This would also be an awesome tool for any allomancer even without duralumin. You are always ready and never at risk for heavy metal poisoning. The only real drawback is you would probably have some sort of autoimmune response to the insertion site. Maybe not though because there is enough investiture in these individuals to have far less issues anyway. Other than the mists trying to kill people I don't remember anyone having infected wounds... Maybe there is absolutely no drawback to this system thanks to the magic protecting you.

I was thinking about a group of characters who were close to each other and what it would be like for them to be separated by worlds out of necessity in the Cosmere. How do you think they would communicate? My first gut reaction was that Harmony could pass messages between each of them via hemalurgy, but that involves convincing a Shard to play telephone for you. Besides that, didn't Melaan have to receive the news of Wayne's death through some mail courier? So unlikely that Harmony would simply play telephone as I dont even remember him telling his Kandra on a mission from him about that. My next thought was span reeds but I am not convinced that anywhere else in the cosmere has the means to fuel one. What are yall's thoughts. Do we know how the ghostblood's are operating under Kelsier's direction or how they are reporting back to him on their progress?

I think a lack of bullet time is good for zinc. We can only imagine and speculate on what it might or what it must feel like to think that fast. How do you comprehend the idea that there is a power that allows you to comprehend nearly instantly. Infact intuitive leaps is more what I would describe it as. The world is happening near real time but you process and time out there most accurate move in an instant. As a kid deciding you want to jump across the creek you don't have to sit down and math out the physics of the jump. You simply know that you need to jump moderately hard or that you need to jump really hard. I think that zinc is closer to that than bullet time. I can't imagine thinking at a speed fast enough for me to double my thought in the same time... if I am consciously thinking about two or three times the stuff it would be really really difficult to not hate life as I think I would feel painfully slow. Thus I prefer to think of it as intuitive leaps. You process so much faster and the subconscious filters through the the algorithms faster and faster. Thinking about if I were running through a critical situation with a patient and we are considering all of the signs and symptoms. I don't think that zinc would force me to go through all of the exact same thought processes if it did then I would be frozen in time to get a critical decision made in a few seconds. In fact, in critical situations the flow of time and experiencing the urgency of the situation is part of what allows us to make choices. I like to think of zinc as less of me running through the algorithm consciously and more of my subconscious processing power being ramped up so much that intuitive leaps are able to be had. I like it to be more akin to just knowing. Ken Jennings is the example Brandon gives and I don't think Ken Jennings ever had to think about what he knows or not. Its just there and his mind pulls it to the forefront in what seems like an instant. The same processing process is happening but his wiring lets it happen faster. Maybe I am the only person who thought of zinc like flipping through the file cabinet super fast... but I think now it is knowing where that file is kept without needing to flip through it. How does that make sense for storing and tapping? I honestly don't know. But I think the magic of supercomprehension and superprocessing is incomprehensible and unprocessable. I have never thought at double speed. But I have had experiences of just knowing. Although maybe that is coppers thing more than zincs. I also don't think zinc will allow a 6th grader to suddenly become a doctor. I think zinc allows a 6th grader to process what he has learned in an instant but I don't think it allows you to know things you never knew you never knew. How do I differentiate zinc and copper then? I think of copper more like a file cabinet. I think copper will always have those memories as you put them. Maybe if your memory is full it takes more.work for.the processor. Maybe not. Crazy little example of nothing... my wife has this friend who is 95 years old. She has never forgotten a number. She can tell you instantly the birthday of anyone she has ever heard. She can't tell you what color car you drive but remembers your car by the license plate... Is this more akin to zinc or to copper? I think she would love copper as a power because she is always complaining that she just doesn't want to remember anymore. She expresses that she wants to forget as remembering it all makes her tired. Don't get me started on my thoughts of chromium. I think that is the same thing. You just know what is right. So you do it and it works out.... likewise, when storing you still know what is right and it never works out. All similar outcomes through seperate means.

I think I may have not illustrated the idea very well... hence the importance of imagery. I am not looking to break physics. I am not looking to turn a guy who has never worked out a day in his life into a fighter like Kaladin, nor am I hoping to break physics more than awakening already does. I'm trying to use copper to create a false set of imagery in the form of someone who suddenly truly envisions themselves as doing those things and that allowing the awakening to do them. You example of watching hema at 1.25x speed is a much better illustration of what I have in mind than picturing someone with a cape that allows flight or anything. This is more along the lines of making psuedo awakened power suits. I know I spout off about different visualizations a bunch. This one is 2 long long ropes, spliced together in the center about the length of a persons torso making a long X, each rope wrapping around the awakeners limbs with some extra length (maybe a total of two or three times the reach of legs or arms). You could totally splice in other rope to fit in where your head would be and now you have checked off one of the boxes for good awakening. Something in roughly the shape of a human. Your imagery will allow each of the lengths of rope to act as a limb. I personally think that material choice is vital to functionality... a 1/4inch thick rope will work better at lifting and throwing things than a strand of dental floss. (1/4 inch hemp rope can hold 500+lbs). Now you wrap yourself in this rope harness and awaken it to fight like you or whatever... to give you strength or act as your hands. You have access to far more reach (seen by Vasher with his sleeves I believe). We know that when Vasher awakened some random clothes they fought for him effectively so why wouldn't this even if it was wrapped around you? Mostly my question was trying to use copper to get around being trained up in it. If you were any profession other than professional soldier but you could spend your nights watching some legit fighters and built up a portfolio of memories... then somehow altered your mind to believe that you did these things... then your visualization of how you want that power suit to work would leave you better off than if you were to awaken it to fight as you and you had spent your life in a non combat related profession. I dont think I would want to trust my life with this and no training at all either. But if the command protect me allows a cloak to snatch arrows out of the air... how long did Vivenna train for that? Did she visualize that very scenario? I dont think so. Something about the awakening process allows the object to work, so long as it is within the materials capability, better than the person would do... It seems to execute its mission flawlessly. I dont remember seeing an awakening that has taken hold fail to work while still whole. Thus if your visualization is that of the perfect fighter and warrior then wouldnt it perform that way? Not saying to enhance it beyond its physical capabilities as a material. I think that envisioning you being faster would probably work so long as the material can do that thing as well. I dont think that a piece of rope is ever going to really break the sound barrier unless specifically designed to do so... maybe whip shaped arms? But then you wont generate enough force to do anything with it. Even just having a rope to hold your weapon and act as your arm an extra 2 feet in front of you would honestly be pretty terrifying to face. Getting past that would not be easy. It would be even harder with no brain to work it. Back to the example of Vivenna's cloak catching an arrow mid flight. Could an attacker even feign their way into range against awakened clothing? Feigning works so well against humans because the reaction speed is limited by being human... Awakened objects dont seem to have that limitation. I know there are some humans who can catch arrows mid flight but Vivenna's cloak caught that arrow. A cloak awakened by a princess, not awakened by Taln or anything, it was awakened by a girl who had been with her powers for all of a couple chapters. The idea of the side kick to the knee or the jab to the face. The longest weapon against the closest target. Some truly direct attacks with double or triple length arms could be insane. No need to study grappling for this either... no one trains to grapple against living rope. This is just me trying to see if anyone else thinks copper compounding could allow a non-fighter to awaken objects as effective at fighting as Vasher. Almost like forging yourself to be a highly trained fighter and it working. Instead this is done through copper and tricking oneself to believe that they are a highly trained fighter before awakening their power suit.

I voted Lerasium simply because it does give a power. But even that is a side effect. The whole RAFO thing doesn't convince me either. Sure atium could be more powerful than lerasium but... If you put 2 pieces of metal in front of me and told me one would make me a mistborn as a side effect to what it really does, which we don't know, and was a part of Preservation... and the other was a part of Ruin and also had no knowledge of what it did and the potential side effects, well I'm going to choose the piece of metal that belonged to the shard of Preservation instead of Ruin. Sure it is a selfish choice, but I don't want to be turned into a monster or turned into a big pile of mush. What we know of God metals in allomancy and feruchemy is that we know almost nothing of God metals in allomancy and feruchemy haha. We have seen one grant the ability to become mistborn and heal a pretty gruesome wound. We have seen one that explodes everytime it gets wet. I just don't want to be the guinea pig to find out. I won't judge atium to the point of saying it doesn't have any potential but in this moment right now... I choose lerasium everytime. I know I will become a lerasium mistborn and that is more than enough for me. Knowledge is cool. But what if you burn that metal and get the answer to everything just as your body turns to Ruin and you perish? The shards intent is a pretty big deal I think and that is a risky risky move playing with the body of someone who wants to see everything destroyed. That is the biggest difference in the Scadrial and Roshar conflicts we have seen. Odium is a big bad and is spooky with his hate and such... but Ruin. Ruin didnt care about anything. His only desire was for Scadrial to be consumed and everyone on it. The apocalypse that Scadrial faced was a much different beast than the one Roshar faces and I think that says a lot about how much you can trust Ruins intent. His entire magic system is based around mutilating people until he can control them, then use them as puppets of destruction... and once they kill everything he would have most likely discarded them as well.

More shower thoughts of awakening and synergies. Copper feruchemy. I used to think that zinc was the better option for synergy with awakening as you might be able to think through a lot more of a command for visualization. But now I am leaning more towards copper. Mostly in this... Is it possible to day dream and store memories in copper. Visualization of being heroic and pulling off some amazing feats. Then... store the memory of you day dreaming. These heroic feats could become your reality. The commands involving "as my" leave a lot of room for flexibility in what awakened materials can do and copper Ferring's may have an edge in this. If copper compounding could make these fake visualizations more vivid and realistic then it would only be more potent. If you combined that with identity alteration it may prove even more potent, but for now I am mostly curious if a copper Ferring who has leaned into the ability to become the most pathological of liars ever... to the point where they have zero clue they are lying because they simply store all memories of creating these memories... Wouldn't they be able to craft up a set of lengthened limbs that fight for him better than he can fight himself? I know we don't know exactly what copper compounding does. In the MAG one of the stunts is referred to as "stitched memories" where you store multiple eye witness accounts of an event and then compound them to give a vivid and more accurate view of the scene. Obviously lies in this case could ruin the copper compounders vision but what if they were the ones telling the lies to themselves and were able to turn that into the visualization they use? Dream up and vividly describe an epic training sequence and a fight scene or two from a fighter... even one with false awakened ropes... then store all of those memories. Store your memories of making up those memories and then tap them or compound them into your mind while storing all memories of yourself compounding or tapping those memories. Now the memories exist in your mind as if they were real and you don't remember fabricating the entire lie. When you go to use that awakening command and have the perfect visualization your intent would not be plagued by any deceit or ill intent because you genuinely believe that these super vivid memories are of yourself doing these things. For a bonus, if a copper Ferring had great artistic abilities or described all of these things as happening from first person it would amplify that imagery even more.

Great ape is a great way of picturing the running style! I really don't know how much faster you could get going... I just assume that if you allowed the legs to move the same speed and doubled the stride length you would end up with roughly doubling the speed. As far as iron usages I mostly just mean to get into a rhythm of being two or three times heavier than you typically are as the ropes load up and then stop tapping any weight at all as you start the launch. Perhaps the air resistance would slow you some but I think the net result would be more acceleration than not. Perhaps the ability to move your limbs to give input to the awakened ropes would be more of a limiting factor if you move too quickly. But the freedom of being able to run over nearly all terrain as fast as the ropes can carry you with the added benefit of the awakened objects sparing your body while doing it seems like it could easily outshine and outclass the stride and speed of other arts. I don't know that it would be able to completely compete with something like plate in strength... but in terms of mobility and maneuverability it could be pretty dangerous. Add on the added benefit of doubling or tripling reach when fighting seems pretty great to me. Awakening is limited by the imagination. The more people start to think differently and adopt commands closer to what Vasher was using in the "act as my..." I think that it could make for some of the most bonkers looking tactics.

I was thinking about that a bit too. Picturing the balance that may or may not be needed to make this work. I think for long distance traveling it may even be more beneficial to adopt more of a 4 limbed run. It would probably look really doofy but I think the mobility and flexibility of rope limbs could really allow you to move pretty well. If combining powers and someone were to acquire a form of F-iron do you think that being heavier with longer limbs would be more beneficial or being lighter? I guess if the ropes are strong enough you could really get a stride going if you time being heavier with each kick and then storing quickly after to use the idea of preservation of momentum to your advantage.

So I was totally nerding out with a shower thought this morning about those sweet jumping stilts and my brain got onto the "how would this work with awakening" thought. Those stilts are heavy, ridged and bulky. But what if ropes were to replace them? A few of Vasher's commands that we see on screen involve lengthening his limbs and having the cloth / ropes act as extensions of natural movements. If you had ropes wrapped around your legs that you could some how command to give strength and lengthen out based on your effort input how could this work? Say you start sprinting and the ropes start to lengthen a bit more each step. Could you end up with a stride 2-3x or even more the length of your typical stride? Would this increase your typical ground speed by an equal amount? Being ropes and awakened I don't think they need to remain perfectly ridged like stilts. They could likely act as a new joint entirely and lengthen the stride disproportionately from the new length of the legs. But if this combined with your natural sprinting form and not suffer the limitations of the real life jumping stilts I feel like it could probably create the fastest non ferring sprinter in the cosmere. To elevate the thought further, the ropes could be split into longer finger like lengths to allow for sprinting and gliding over nearly any surface. You could sprint through the trees and if you extended this same idea and thought to ropes on your arms as well you could be swinging and sprinting through thick cover or scaling mountain hikes at breakneck speed. That said I think there would be other limiting factors. How well would the awakener handle the inertia of high maneuverability at double or triple normal speeds? Perhaps awakening your clothing to tighten and brace you you could replicate the flight suit mechanics that fighter jet pilots use to keep the blood flowing right.

I am a huge fan of the slow fall imagery of F iron but I don't enjoy flying mechanics. I am trying to think of other slow fall mechanic possibilities and was curious of you think it would be possible for an edgedancer or dustbringer to use abrasion to increase the friction on their skin or clothes enough to cause a slow fall sort of effect. Perhaps it would be painful? But they have stormlight to autoheal through any real damage. In the same realm... can they reduce the friction to almost nothing... could you make enough of an impact with no friction possible to die from a fall or could they hit the ground and slide away slowly letting up and slowing themselves down?

Am I a bad guy thinking OB was the worst 45 hours of my life? There were glimpses of greatness in it but overall it was way too slow for my liking and I never felt like anyone was in danger... ever. Now BoM is a great book and the train scenes were some of my favorite in all of the cosmere. The amount of character building we saw and the introduction to primer cubes were some of my all time favorites. All that said my answer is still Warbreaker. For any literary issues it may have... that world fascinated me. The magic is my favorite in the cosmere, mainly for portability of the breaths and the possibility of it working in tandem with other systems in the future. Seeing the Returned die at the end was also a point in the basket for it. It just isn't fun reading about people who can heal through everything. The danger was always real in Warbreaker and I don't feel that in other cosmere books. Make no mistake I am so attached to my characters that I can't help but try to fit F gold into every build... but to read the stories healing on the level we see in the cosmere just makes fightscenes fall flat. Even Miles vs Wax... when Miles gets shot in the face and it heals back before it can even get messy is a cool moment in a scene but the rest of the scene loses so much of its potential as you quickly realize that Wax will never get hit or killed and despite landing every shot he takes Miles will simply never die. Fun in theory as you meet the unstoppable force vs the immovable object but other than an excuse to fill 5 pages with cool new ideas on how to use steel it falls flat when neither character is in danger.

So perhaps the most terrifying item to loadout with would be a needle and thread tucked into the pocket of your awakened clothing with the command to stitch them back together when cut. Even as your enemies are cutting down your awakened army the flanking, repaired cloth soldiers would eventually be put back together. Like a really slow version of F gold for your awakened constructs haha. On a more serious note... I think that more than even trying ropes together is to unwrap a bit of them! If the rope is 3 smaller lengths spliced or wrapped together and you tied some sort of stopping point for them to unravel about a foot or so up your length of rope you could include in your visualization them unwrapping themselves and using those lengths as 3 long finger to even further ensnare your enemies. If you get those dexterous enough your awakened rope could end up doing serious work for you... wrap up a heavy rock and turn themselves into loaded monkey fists or be delicate enough to handle precision jobs with longer fingers... you could even work this command and fashion your length of rope with multiple tiers of fingers... each finger can split into fingers etc. A large piece of rope might be able to open itself into small enough strands to become a lock picking tool as well. The potential for one rope to be able to carry in all the groceries, act as a key and open up the door to your home all at once... Honestly... awakened constructs could be the most hideous looking scraps of randomness ever and still be the most functional. Who needs robots when you could braid and wrap thick ropes into a rough human shape with the ability to transform and unravel their arms and hands to do whatever you need.

I don't know the answer to that one. If awakened objects work off of some sort sense of their own similar to life sense or other invested senses i think that the visualization for a blind person could work in a way... The "act as my legs" should work for that visualization even if a blind person doesn't know what legs look like. Perhaps blind people would not be limited with awakening commands involving the way they move and "see" themselves moving. I also imagine an awakener with access to other enhanced senses would be able to include those, in a way, to their awakening. We already know that there are awakened objects that can detect movement to the point of catching shots at the back. I don't know the exact mechanism for how the objects see but there is obviously something going on there that makes their ability to sense the world around them acute and accurate enough to catch fast moving projectiles... how many people can catch an arrow out of thin air? I always liked the idea of Awakening something with a command to grant the ability to sense the world in the way that awakened objects can. A blindfold that grants a sort of 6th sense that is 360 degrees and can pick up on all movement would be awesome! Possibly even worth giving up real sight for temporarily.