ChickenBonanza

Aluminum is treated weird and sometimes more influential than it should be, in my mind.

Like, aluminum is Investiture-inert. It itself is unaffected by Invested functions. Can’t be Soulcasted from, can’t be Lashed, can’t be pushed, can’t be disintegrated/spiritual-super-cut by Shardblade, blocks Cognitive Allomancy and other related effects, mess with Fabrials.

Those effects all pertain to aluminum itself. Investiture attempting to get a grasp on aluminum cannot. However, would still be susceptible to, say, being pushed as a result of being hit by a Lashed object, and would not disrupt that Lashing by contact.

Or, at least, it should not.

There are Words which describe the presence of aluminum in wounds preventing magically enhanced healing, like gold Feruchemy. I feel that this is not strictly the purview of aluminum.

Yes, the presence of aluminum in an Invested system would disrupt goings-on, but it is noted that pewter would function more-or-less normally in such a circumstance, but not healing?

If Investiture can still act correctly within an aluminum-contaminated body, such that healing would still operate in wounds not containing aluminum, then it would be by proximity to aluminum that Invested healing would falter, would it not? Otherwise the body would heal and push the aluminum out. However, it does not very much limit the power of pewter, so why different standards?

Similarly, creating dead zones in Bendalloy/Cadmium bubbles leans more towards disruptions than simple inertness. Burning aluminum with Allomancy is odd too. Is the disintegration of aluminum through burning not, in its way, Investiture working upon it?

Another Word worries me. That aluminum doesn’t always completely inhibit different magics. Makes understanding it well harder.

Anyway, those examples of aluminum encroach, I feel, on the functions of a different metal. Silver. Silver is based on disruption, interfering with Investiture around it in a way that is not ‘blocking,’ like with forms of Investiture sense. It’s like… Silver is external, Aluminum internal.

Granted, Speed Bubbles could make sense, if one sees their function as slowing/speeding every individual inside, instead of warping spacetime directly, but I do not think that is the case. Actually, it works either way. Aluminum’s presence and effect on space counteracts it. But that’s all not important.

There is a question of whether things like aluminumminds and filled Hemalurgic aluminum exist, or whether a Feruchemist utilizing aluminum cannot actually store Identity. Instead Feruchemists would use aluminum as a key for their Feruchemy to begin the Identity storing process, wherein the filling of aluminum fails.

Hemalurgic aluminum would work similarly. Aluminum would act as a key such that Ruin’s power knows to remove a power, whereupon it could not place that power in the aluminum if it wanted to. Resulting in removal.