Argent

Kalak for Nale's companion is not as commonly accepted as you make it sound - we are far more confident in Nale and Shalash than in him. But it's still a popular theory.

World Time Buddy is a nice webapp for the... time challenged. A feeling I am all too well aware of. Just add the places you want to compare (if they are not already there), save, and compare.

I really don't know how I feel about that... Then again, I like to pretend I am all honorable, but lies are a much better way to show the world how clever you really are.

Brandon hinted heavily that it's Hoid in a few places.

Earth 2.0 was a poorly chosen example on my part. I was thinking of a planet that's had no connection to Earth, so naturally the only thing that came to mind was the most Earth-like name ever...

As long as neither one of us rams bad puns down the other one's throat...

Nah, you're fine, no need to change it.

Oh, dear. An axehound costume? That's, um... Original. Very much so. Also, we already have a Feather. A writer, but still. This could get confusing.

But that's because we are a stupid species confined to a single planet. When we find ourselves in a situation where we need to deal with multiple planetary civilizations, we'll most likely redefine what a kilogram means instead of coming up with a conversion factor between Earth kilo and Earth 2.0 kilo. The same way we did with... meter, was it? Didn't the SI definition of a meter get recently updated to read "the distance light travels in X fraction of a second," with second already being defined in terms of the hydrogen atom or something? So a good unit of mass would be the mass of N iron atoms, for example - which would weigh differently on each planet, but that wouldn't matter, because the number of atoms would be the same.

Eh, right, but the problem remains - you still need to figure out the different gravitational constants, because the likelihood of two Shardworlds coming up with the same gram is practically nil. A Selish gram will be different from a Rosharan one, so you would either need a worldhopper travel from one world to the other and enforce the first world's measuring system (which is not happening), or keep the two independent and convert between them. Which brings us back to the gravitational constants.

I hope you are prepared to face the ramifications of this.

The incredible burden of reputation I carry for you guys...

Wow, that's a pretty rad Zahel. I wonder why I never saw them...

Well, we know he is...

I am fairly certain we have a WoB that not all Shards have a counterpart.

We can't actually see the photo, it's private. Why don't you upload to something like imgur or flickr?

Nothing we've seen suggests that keeping a gem in darkness affects its Stormlight retention (or decay) rate.

Well, do keep in mind, book covers for the YA and middle grade markets have to feature more... childlike protagonists. The art itself isn't bad - it's just not the Vin we see in the books.

We don't actually know how the whole "sent back to Damnation" thing works, so I would try to stay away from conclusions based on related assumptions. What if a Herald gets blown to smithereens during one of the Desolations - what would get sent to Braize? Their spirit? Their body restored by one of the Shards (because I don't see anything less being able to put a body together after it has been blown up by the magical equivalent of a landmine)? Their mind? Memories? A part of their realmatic aspects ripped away from them and kept in a magical box somewhere, to ensure their eventual return? Most of those scenarios would deal with the Honorblades' bonds differently.

I could easily make the same argument against necrosil - measuring one gram (for example) of it is going to depend on the planet you are on, so it would require multiple gravitational constants, not to mention that only Feruchemists can verify its composition. Plus, if you are going for simplicity, you might as well use one Nalthian Breath as the core unit. No, I would much prefer an approach where we quantify each type of Investiture separately, using whatever means make the most sense in the different Shardworlds, and only then trying to figure out conversion formulae between them. To answer your first question - gems of the same type, shape, and size must decay at an equal rate. Otherwise you have a randomness factor that's literally impossible to account for. So, assuming mathematically predictable decay rate of Investiture trapped inside gemstones, it should be pretty easy to form a few hypotheses (linear decay, cubic decay, luminescence-based decay are three that come to mind right away) and test them. I agree it's not exact science, but I strongly suspect the results will be accurate.

I'll just copy my comments from Facebook:

But here, Seons - and Skaze - are capitalized. The Divine Breath is capitalized. Honorspren, for some reason are not, but Cryptics are (though that particular bit might be completely irrelevant). Why wouldn't the category all those fall under also be capitalized? Anyway. Not important. Not enough, at least.

Gemstones can only be infused during a highstorm. @Aoibheann (you really need an easier username...) is suggesting that larkin, even dead ones, might be able to infuse gemstones with Stormlight even in, for example, broad daylight.

They are both derived from Shard, so it was obvious to me that they should be capitalized as well. Shard of Adonalsium, Splinter of Honor.

That would be interesting, yes. I was going to walk myself through what happens if I read this thread, but things got very meta very quickly...