CryoZenith

On 22.03.2022 at 5:31 PM, AerionBFII said:

I honestly think her mind is almost completely been corrupted by her Shard. We saw how flawed Ruin, Preservation and Odium became in regards to simply going along with the flow of their Shard. I think her intent was to create a Shard she could influence, shape and train for the War of The God's that is apparently coming. She is sentient enough to see the weakness of Rayse in that the discontent between him and his Shard gave her an opening but I think she grossly underestimated Taravangian, maybe the boon and curse she gave him will help balance out the Odium-ness(?) but I don't think she should take her eyes off her new student.

While I concede that it would make sense in terms of plot, and would be really interesting, I really dislike it conceptually in terms of the magic system. So I will keep assuming that Taravangian's boon/bane disappeared when he Ascended until proven otherwise (not necessarily IC, WoBs work too). Yes, I will feel really silly if I turn out to be wrong, but I'm biting the bullet.

(to be specific, there are three main issues with the boon/bane persisting, beyond even what it says about the power level of Cultivation's magic: 1. Since Todium is mostly in the SR, the concept of intelligence and empathy changing randomly every *day* doesn't really track to anything. 2. As a vessel, with the expanded mind customary to being a vessel, even "bad intelligence days" would manifest as high intelligence for Todium. 3. If Cultivation really is planning something that would put Todium in danger or put him under her control, all Todium needs is ONE "good intelligence day" to figure it all out.)

On 18.03.2022 at 6:29 PM, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

I don't think the "salt" it mentions is table salt, sodium chloride, as we think of it. The book mentions the salt rocks being *black* if i remember correctly. So here's my proposition:

 

Oooh. This sounds right

On 08.03.2022 at 6:58 AM, KaladinWorldsinger said:

Secret book 4: shardworld of invention!

As much as I'd love that, it might be the case that Invention doesn't have a shardworld.

11 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

What it does not do is far less clear. It does not do Allomancy. I think we must assume that it does not work against the Fused or the Returned. But that is an assumption.

We just need Vasher or Leshwy to sustain a shallow cut from a silver blade in SA 5 and we'll be able to put that to rest. My guess is most cogshadows don't care.

Marasi is just a huge vibe for me. She reminds me to a surprisingly large degree of myself.

I'm just gonna point out something that might support the theory.

Iri. Ire. Very similar words. Could easily be etymologically evolved from each other.

On 12.03.2022 at 10:26 PM, Ixthos said:

I also have a hard time believing that arriving in the middle of a fire ball with your memories gone is the standard package.

[Edit] Furthering that point, if it is the standard package, why was the book the transferee needed destroyed by said fireball?

It's not standard package, it's budget :D. And as the guide specifically said, the budget package comes with temporary memory loss :D.

So I don't think that's suspicious. I do agree that the second part is very suspicious, though - traveling in a way that destroys the guidebook is definitely not part of any package.

It's possible for a maladaptive trait to coast by if there are insufficient environmental pressures on a species that would cause that trait to reduce fitness.

So the timeline would look like this: the beings evolved extremely precise hearing because it was initially an upside, their hearing kept getting stronger and stronger with each generation, until at a certain point it got too strong, to the point of becoming a weakness, but at this point, they were already the apex predators with no reliable competitors in their ecosystem, so nothing could force them to need to dial it back anymore. Also, there is a feedback loop here with the environment: for the other species surrounding the monsters, it was beneficial for fitness to become more silent in order to survive their sound-based predators, so in the present day, strong-sound-making adaptations would serve them well, but they already selected themselves out of that option completely.

There's another possibility which is a bit out there. And I say "out there" not because it's super implausible that this could happen evolutionarily, but "out there" because in a writerly sense, most non-biologists wouldn't consider it. Namely, that there's a gene cluster that coincidentally grants both the armor plating and the sound weakness. And even though this cluster is not strict upside, it's still "worth it", so the monsters that had this cluster outbred the monsters that didn't.

Quote

Don't limit yourself to invisibility, think bigger! This is the 17th shard after all, the place where sticks are revered as gods.

Quote

Name: Tudor

Pronouns: he/him/they/them

Age: 26

New form: A large (6'5" by 3'5"), supported grand mirror, rectangular in shape. The frame is made of solid tungsten.

Skills and Abilities: Perfect color recognition, very good memory, fast writing and typing skills

Former Appearance: Tall, medium-weight white slavic dude with dark brown eyes and hair, large nose as the most noticeable facial feature.

Personality: Quick to anger, tendency to condescend and overexplain their points, made even worse post-transformation. Very honest and transparent, has a hard time interacting with people who aren't. Hates sophistry. General purpose thirst for knowledge.

Powers: Two powers. Power one: The surface of the mirror can display absolutely anything, as long as it sticks to three restrictions: it must be something Tudor knows about, it must be within the visible light spectrum, and it can't be brighter than 1200 lumens. So, basically, Tudor can't use their display power to gain knowledge, and can't produce blinding levels of light offensively (although they DO have offensive options, they're just not aware of them yet), but other than that, they can act like a super high resolution monitor. Right now however, Tudor has only learned to do three things with this power: display a copy of themselves, display exactly what the mirror should be reflecting, to hide that it's not a normal mirror, and display words. The mirror can neither produce nor perceive sounds, smells, and temperature. Essentially, its only sense is sight. Power two: The frame of the mirror can have a thermal differential built into it, causing it to expand and contract unevenly in order to move very slowly, at a rate of one foot per minute. Tudor does not know they can do this yet.

Former Profession: civil lawyer, specialized in intellectual property

Other Stuff: Tudor is currently hung in a museum hall, and as I mentioned, they don't know they're able to move yet. It would be nice for a different person from the RP to notice them and help them out.

2 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

- Another thought is Illumination. Would tin sensory boost, or bronze Allomancy, help distinguish illusions from reality? If not, a Lightweaver vs Fullborn fight might be long and inconclusive.

Illumination is not primarily mental illusions. It's (for the most part) photomancy. You are creating actual, real photons, real light. So I doubt tin would help pierce through it, but bronze probably would!

7 hours ago, cometaryorbit said:

But given the recent WoB about Era 1 atium actually being an alloy, I'm wondering if that is partly intended to fix that issue.

I can't find it off the cuff, but there is a WoB where Brando says something along the lines of "well emeralds are just aluminum oxide, but they don't have any of the investiture-inert properties of aluminum metal." So it is definitely possible that when you sufficiently chemically alter something, it does the trick.

9 hours ago, Nameless said:

Maybe not, but I could tell them it would give them a new breath.

Oooh, spicy.

19 hours ago, Nameless said:

If I was going to be evil? I'd pick hemalurgy. If I was not trying to be evil? I dunno. Maybe regrowth? I could perhaps heal their lack of breath.

Not sure if regrowth would work that way, since the Spiritual Ideal of a human is a human that lacks breath (otherwise Radiants would give themselves one breath accidentally, right?). So my guess would be that if you take a drab and apply regrowth to them, it won't literally do nothing (it probably would boost their innate investiture some), but I doubt it would re-give them the property of having a breath.

I don't think it's that wild to speculate that Brandon now regrets that he made Atium easy to push-pull, and if he had to write mistborn era 1 all over again, that would be one of the things he would change. I don't think this was meant to holistically make sense.

Creation and being or not being created is a very finicky construct (and I don't even mean metaphysically; I'm talking about linguistics and language use).

Like, we generally say that our parents created us, but we don't typically say that our grandparents created us, but despite the latter, we do say that our way-back ancestors created our lineage (although we don't quite think of it in terms of them creating us). But then we're fine with saying that God created us (and not just us as in humanity, but us as in us-us). We're also cool with crediting God with creating different pieces of natural landscape and geography, even if they're too young/recent to have been made "at the beginning" (even in a young earth sense) but we don't credit God with creating anthropic things like the internet or toilet paper.

Basically, my point is that "to be created by" is such a linguistically fuzzy term and its relationship with degrees of separation is so haphazard that I don't think we can productively speculate on what it means for Brandon to say that the Aethers don't think Adonalsium created them, not until we get to see how the Aethers express this belief IC.

This is off topic. Regardless of what powers being a Son of Tanavast entails, they're not powers related to being a 4th ideal radiant, so should have no bearing in a powerscaling debate between a fullborn and a 4th ideal radiant.

I basically just think Invention is probably in residence nowhere, rather than in residence somewhere that isn't a planet. I pretty much picture him as Odium was before he came to Roshar, unbound to a specific planet. And I am making the assumption that when a shard is unbound/has no resident planet, they are hard to find by everyone, not just ordinary people, but also worldhoppers and even other shards. There might be worlds minorly influenced by his Investiture, like Ashyn is by Cultivation or First of the Sun is by Autonomy, but probably nothing else.

I think this is more likely than him residing in a fleet of spaceships or something because if he really was just in that sort of conjecture, I don't see why Sazed would be unable to locate him.

Just now, Oltux72 said:

Massively unhealthy. You could make a fortune selling medication against high blood pressure. I suppose strokes are the most common cause of death.

Possibly. But I would guess with 12 massive blobs of sentient investiture chilling around Lunar humans are innately invested to near Rosharan levels, which presumably comes attached with some cardiovascular protection.

(it's Invention not Innovation)

I take "Invention not residing on a planet" as meaning that Invention is currently not Invested-bound anywhere in the physical, rather than that his physical presence is somewhere in space. Essentially that all of him is in the SR. I wouldn't bet on it, but if I had to bet, I think it would be more likely that we get to meet Mercy or Valor than that we get to meet Invention.

The writerly answer (which is different from the in-world answer) is that if you left silver as the only weakness of the spores, you would have a vastly depopulated Lumar, possibly even extinct. In a way, Threnody works the same. It's just that in Threnody the "number two method" is not a substance, but a behavior (following of the Simple Rules). If, writerly speaking, having silver available was the only way to deal with Shades on Threnody, and they would be enraged regardless if you followed any rules or not, then that planet would be vastly depopulated too. The in-world answer I'm not sure about.

By the way, here is a fun culinary thing to get you (potentially) disturbed. The human body is 0.5% salt by mass. That is a decently high amount of salt. That is *not enough* to deactivate the verdant spores, not even approximately enough. Which means that the salted tea they drink on the rock is 1% salt by mass or more. I just want everyone to be aware of just how SALTY that is, how much of an acquired taste it would need to be.

Presuming the following two things:

1. I'm burning this IRL

2. I'm the only person IRL who is a misting

I'd pick brass. Not only is it super useful to have access to any kind of mind control in so many situations (even this weak of mind control) but nobody would see it coming or guard against it, or know that I'm the one doing it.

Let me just put it this way: if burning brass and zinc wasn't that useful for manipulating people, Elendel wouldn't have had to pass a law banning it. And it would be even more effective IRL as people would just assume they're having an off day and suspect nothing.

On 27.02.2022 at 5:31 AM, cometaryorbit said:

Hmm, good point. Though TLR would have had to compound much more youth at 1,000+ than Marsh yet needs to, there was probably enough in the Trust to last him until the Pits re-started.

There's also (as per WoB) the fact that steel inquisitors have naturally longer lifespans than humans, so presumably the way that influences the math is by making them require less atium for the same amount of youth.

Granted, your boon is that you become very gifted as a writer. Your bane is that you lose all your business and budgeting sense, and you are never able to publish a book again.

I wish to become fireproof.

Hm. Couple things on my mind. Some in direct disagreement with your post, some in somewhat of a contrast.

1. Style and substance can both greatly benefit a book, but they're not equal. Think about it this way: what you get when you combine a ton of style with almost zero substance is something like James Joyce's Ulysses, which is widely considered one of the best pieces of literature ever. On the other hand, what you get when you combine a ton of substance with almost zero style is a Dungeon's & Dragons supplementary DM's book, arguably not a piece of literature at all. Being able to present something, no matter how mundane, in a very flowery and interesting and intricate way, is what makes a writer a writer. Now, writing about a something that happens to be extraordinary rather than mundane is a cherry on top, it helps, but it's not the point.

2. Mind the difference between realism and internal consistency. Realism is not a requirement for good literature, but internal consistency often is. It's fine for a writer to write whatever the hell they want, but they have to include ties to the oddities in the "initial conditions of the world". So it's not a problem to have dragons, but it is a problem to have dragons without at least some lip service to "why" the dragons are there (if the dragons are pivotal to the plot, otherwise, w/e). Because it breaks immersion.

3. Mind the difference between a book being bad and a book being badly written. Somebody who dislikes a book because, say, it has too much gore, or it has too much sex, or it doesn't have enough lgbt representation, or it has too much lgbt representation, or it has too much sexism, or it doesn't have enough sexism (relative to how the in-world culture should realistically be), thinks that nobody should read it because it's harmful, not because it's aesthetically underwhelming (that's an orthogonal axis). Sure, there are readers who confuse the two emotions, but I would guess that most readers can tell the difference.

4. If too many readers have the "I don't like this, I should look for something else"  mentality (or, alternatively, the "if I don't have something nice to say, I should say nothing at all" mentality), that's counterproductive to writers. If writers *only* received constructive criticism from readers who *did* overall like their book, then they would improve at a much slower pace. We need *some* amount of respectful-but-overall-disapproving vocal readership for optimal growth.