Underwater_Worldhopper

Again, it's like trying to fit keys into a lock. Even if you don't know which key is the right one, you know that you have 16 keys and one of them will open the lock. All you need to do is test each one, which, given the nature of Investiture and the lack of needing to insert, try, and remove a literal, physical key, happens near-instantly That... kind of proves my point. Your very being knows what attributes it can convert, it's literally encoded into you. You're making a few mistakes here though. If you try to force strength into a Steelmind, nothing would happen, but not because of Intent, quite the opposite. Just by trying, you're providing an Intent to do that very thing. It's the Feruchemical property of the metal that's stopping it from happening. Your body knows what attributes can and can't be converted. When you try to store something in metal, even if you don't know what it is, your body does, and it will try to convert and store those attributes. Only, depending on the metal you're trying to store in, only a single attribute will be allowed in. Thus, without knowing the attribute itself, you can still store and tap it. That still doesn't quite make sense. As you mentioned just earlier, the body knows what can and can't be stored. There won't be any common objects in the room, only the storable attributes. The existence of an un-storable 'common object' attribute implies that you can convert anything into Investiture, and it's the metal that determines what you can store and tap - which we know isn't the case. Hence, you'd still only have attributes as objects that you can try to fit into the holes, which, like i said earlier, can be easily figured out just by trying to store everything the body knows can be stored. Like I said earlier, even if you don't know it's there, your body does. And if Feruchemy works by the Filtration Model, that's all it takes to be able to store and tap something, so long as you have the metal. Kids with telekinesis would be a nightmare. But the whole thing with blocks is an analogy. You don't actually need to pick up blocks and fit them into matching crevices, those are representations of things you would be doing internally. That's what I was referencing, the different Investitures being formless and able to be applied simultaneously to a given metal to see what attribute goes in. The thing is, I would use it to try and figure out the metallic arts. That's what Bavadinium would have been; except Wax, after he does his experiments, donates his samples to the University, where people with more experience and time than him could experiment with it. A Fullmind, even a single one too small to hold any appreciable amount of any attribute would still do wonders for scientific advancement in Feruchemy. This doesn't really prove anything against my argument. It's the same thing as the Fullmind. With a metal that doesn't automatically filter all incorrect attributes, you would need to single out which attribute(s) you want to store. In that type of scenario, you would need to have a specific Intent. Same thing here. When you're Compounding, you need to burn the metal in a way that it hooks up Preservation's Investiture to the Feruchemical charge, not the metal itself. Multiple options, just like the Fullmind, and so, specific Intent is required. If you were burning Steel for Steelsight and Steelpushing, suddenly switching to burning it and not getting those effects would be jarring; Therefore, as Brandon said, you'd need to practice and figure out what it is you're trying to do and how to do it. It doesn't, for the reasons I give above. You know, you've convinced me on this one. We're focusing a bit too much on Intent; Here, just knowing an attribute is storable without knowing which metal stores is most probably enough to store and tap it, and you could do that by guessing. I think for narrative reasons it would be way too powerful, but in theory, it should work just fine. SA Cosmere Spoilers SA Like I said before, I doubt a spike is "sticky". Metal isn't and never has been alive, so just as it would be hard to Awaken it, no remnant of a soul would want to stay in it. The only reason Hemalurgic charges remain in a spike is because of the Metal's nature as a focus for that magic system, as well as the fact that it mimics hal-life decay. Also, in RoW, playing the plate nearly ejects the Voidlight from Raboniel's Gemheart, separately from making her soul "cringe". It also forces Voidlight out of multiple spheres, even when not directly touching. Just the sound is enough. The proper Anti-Tone should force out the soul fragment. As for the Anti-Tone weapon, a single plate being played makes Raboniel's soul uncomfortable. That alone should make enemy soldiers perform worse, barring needing to replicate that volume everywhere on a battlefield. However, if a plate alone can make you uncomfortable, surely a loud enough burst of Anti-Tone could force your soul out. A gigantic speaker in the middle of a battlefield should kill those in a radius around it, maybe knock others out in a larger one, and make people on the outskirts squeamish. Could just be that since there are two mists now, those ones just happened to be the Preservation ones, which move away at the notion of murder? That's a valid way of thinking of it too. The tone is the sound that is heard in singing or playing the notes, while the rhythm is just the repetition or pattern in a song. That's true, but look at any given Half-Life scale with actual values on it, and even though it gets very close, it never actually touches down on 0. That's because, with each half-life, the rate at which it's going down gets smaller and smaller by 50%. That means that it'll never actually hit zero, but rather keep dividing by 2 in increasingly shrinking amounts infinitely. The same is true for Hemalurgy. Whether you ever end up with 0 radioactive material in real life or not, Brandon himself has said that a Hemalurgic spike will never run out of charge. The Investiture is constantly leaking out, the nature of the metal as the focus just keeps the soul stapled there. I think you could make it work, should the soul not fade away. The metal is important for getting the right soul fragment from the victim. Once you have it, it should work the same way regardless of the container. Normally the problem is getting the charge out of the spike, but with Raysium, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Cosmere Spoilers

Would

He still has regular Breaths, so he isn't in any immediate danger during the Weepings, but good point. Your idea could work too, although I doubt he has nearly that many on him. I'm not sure if it was ever stated in the text, but I thought for some reason he only had about 2-3 hundred Breaths. I may be confusing him with Hoid though. Depends on how much Stormlight A Returned would need to consume each week to live, but that can certainly be a possibility

It's been mentioned by Brandon that Vasher has a way of getting Stormlight into himself that's different from how Squires, Radiants, and people with Honorblades do it, and that's how he's keeping himself alive on Roshar. I have a theory about how he does it. So, my first thought upon seeing this was that he swallows the gems. A bit blunt, but we see that in Mistborn, having at least a part of something inside you makes the object act as though it were Invested due to your Spiritual Aspect. That idea went out the window nearly as soon as I'd thought of it. Swallowing the sphere doesn't suffuse its Investiture into your soul, which is required for what Vasher is doing. Besides, things in your body resist Invesiture more because the presence of your SA is interfering, rather than the object becoming part of your SA. After that, I landed on a much better idea. Vasher can, as a Returned, have access to the first 5 Heightenings whenever he pleases. One of those Heightenings is perfect pitch. What if Vasher collects a mound of Stormlight-Infused spheres, then sings Honor's Pure Tone, loud or intense enough to the point that Stormlight actually leaves the spheres and enters his body? That way, the Investiture will have actually entered his body and soul properly, which he could feed on to stay alive, and it's something regular people can learn (As evidenced by Navani). It seems to tick all of the boxes Brandon outlines in the WoB. I have some questions though. Would having Stormlight in your body that way trigger Stormlight healing, even a bad version of it? If a Scadrian learned to replicate this, could they burn the Stormlight similar to the Unkeyed Dor in TLM as a hyper-efficient replacement for metals without needing a Spren bond?

We await the terms, Land Overlord. It would be an honor to enter a Contract with one of your status, leader of the F-Tin Cult

The Central Dominance on Scadrial is fashioned after France in many ways, and in French 'er' (when on the end of a word) is pronounced "ay". In-world, people would call him Kel-See-Ay, but I learned French after I had already read the Mistborn books, so I read it Kel-see-er/Kel-seer too. Pronunciation is up to whatever sounds the best to you. As for Sazed, I speak a variety of languages, and one of them influenced how I ended up pronouncing Sazed: I call him S-ah-z-ed, with ed like in Eddy. Sah-zed; Nobody else I know says it like that, so I'm just my own flavor of weird when it comes to Sazed. Most people I've met call him Say-zzd.

Seems to be, Koloss17 is probably sighing in relief. That's because you're generating the Investiture yourself, converting something of yourself into Investiture. It's not like you can convert any aspect of your body into Investiture, only the specific 16 (ignoring God metals again for the time being). And you can't do that on your own, either. A Feruchemist on their own can't start converting their speed into Investiture until they have a Steelmind to stash it in. You can only do that once you have somewhere to put it. Otherwise, there's a lock on your abilities. Extrapolating from this, once you have a metal, say a Steelmind, but don't know which of the attributes you can store in the Steelmind, you should just be able to 'store' in the Metalmind and see what goes through. A finite amount of the attributes of your body can be stored, and the metal only allows for one to go through. Circling back to what I said in my last post, it's like having a bunch of things dissolved in water, with a filtered container that will only allow the water to carry the corresponding solute in. Just pour whatever you have in, and only the right thing goes in. No kidding, finding analogs for something that doesn't really exist is hard But you have a very small stock of things that can be converted at all, and the containers of said things only allow their specific corresponding thing through. It's not like you can convert anything in your body into Investiture but the metals refuse to take anything but their respective attributes. In something like that, what you're saying would make sense, but given there's only 16 convertible attributes and 16 corresponding metals, I don't see why that has to be the case. I see what you're saying, but the attributes are part of you, they aren't hidden around outside of you. It's a false dichotomy again. Still, let me try and match it. Say there are 16 blocks and 16 holes, and each forms a 1 to 1 pair. You don't know which one is which. However, since they're all formless (formless as in don't have physical substance, they still can't go into a hole that isn't their's) and you don't have to physically handle them, you can simultaneously try and fit all sixteen in a single hole, and only one will actually go in. Sound analogy. I argue that you don't. The Allomancy one works just as well, I'd say it's better than mine just by virtue of how simple it makes it to wrap your head around. Don't beat yourself up Harsh to the point of impossibility. 10^19000 metals, each attribute you come up with can fit any one of those, or none, so you have no choice but to try and store the attribute you come up with 10^19000 times with different metals (or with different Intents with the Fullmind). Odds are that any attribute you come up with is probably storable in a metal. But will you find out which metal in a lifetime's worth of trying? 2 lifetimes? 10? 20? 1000? You will eventually come across the right one, but 10^19000 is a mind-numbingly big number, far beyond human comprehension. You could spend your life doing nothing but trying to find which metal (if any at all) stores that attribute, and you would most likely die long before you find out. Like I said in one of my earlier posts, you could get lucky and find out one, maybe two that way, but it's just not sustainable. I'll have to disagree here. I think that while Feruchemy doesn't require Intent specific enough to the point of needing to know the attribute you're storing, It can't be so Intentless as to not know the metal. I'm a bit shocked you're saying this, given the points you were making against Feruchemy and Allomancy being similar just earlier, especially since this conflates them way more than what I was suggesting. Not to mention this use of the Fullmind is overpowered far beyond what I was intending to do with it. It needs to be easier because the limitations you suggest make Feruchemical progress nigh impossible. As for the Filtration Model breaking down when confronted with the Fullmind, not really. I just admit that at that point you would need specific Intent because the Fullmind doesn't have a filter. I figured, I said what I said before I realized we were looking at Feruchemy fundamentally differently. Yes, but that argument doesn't hold either. What's the shape of speed? The shape of wakefulness? Beyond F-Pewter, which I could maybe see an argument about the shape, you're really just taking a concept and converting it into Investiture, temporarily depriving you of it. Where the actual transition/insertion of Investiture into the Metalmind is concerned, the attribute is Investiture anyway. Should have been, considering I did that very thing in this thread about seven different times. We really should make a thread just for this and discuss what exactly's going on with Hemalurgy. That one always confuses me, because no other WoB says anything like that. I assume it's a mistake, but it makes so much sense, and it has so many interesting implications. I don't count it as canon myself (for now), but think of what it suggests. Would a Hemalurgist who spiked someone's spren bond not need Stormlight to Surgebind, since they have a direct line to Ruin's Investiture through the spikes, like how an Allomancer can access Preservation's Investiture through the metal. I'll have to check that out. Maybe, I'm sure it would do something, but I feel like something is missing. So Ruin and Preservation's hybrid tone's Anti-Tone is what would drive Investiture out of a Metalmind? Could be. I've always thought it's because the part of your Spiritweb that codes for Allomantic and Feruchemical powers don't affect you much physically, whereas regular human attributes are meant to affect you physically, so they mutate you far, far easier, simply by your Physical Aspect trying to emulate its Spiritual Aspect; Like scrambling you DNA in a way that makes an ear grow out of your thigh, or teeth instead of nails. Your idea has a lot of merit though. Personally, I think you two should battle to the death, and whichever one comes out on top gets my kudos. I haven't checked, but I think the Mists pull away from Wax once he gives himself A-Duralumin. They're not the same thing. Well, a Hemalurgic charge in a spike acts like an unstable radioactive particle, and Hemalurgic decay works basically like Half-life. With that in mind, a Hemalurgic charge would never run out in metal, even though it might weaken to the point of not giving you any power, so it's not the same thing as fading in the way Stormlight does in a Polestone. I think that would be enough to 'kill' a Hemalurgic charge. If the soul fragment somehow stays in the Polestone though (Don't know why or how this would ever happen but let's say it does), could you fashion a spike out of the crystal? Not even by changing the shape of the crystal, necessarily, but by inserting it into the body in the right place as it is?

Makes sense, I suppose. I'd been thinking of making a character that was basically a Selish Artifabrian who made and sold extremely complex toggleable Aonic Fabrials to the Elantrians who weren't obliged to do deep research into Aonic Fabrial creation, but there goes that idea. I suppose he could still sell blueprints or templates for Aons that do very specific things, kind of like what @Duxredux was saying.

So long as it holds true for the majority, the idea is viable. Doesn't that conflict with the WoB above, where Brandon says it depends on Elantrian Intent and activation? I'm definitely missing something here. They seem conflicting to me, but they were said within a week of each other, so I doubt he went back and changed anything.

Those are the ones I'm talking about, since they present you with a much easier way of not only correctable and editable, but reusable Aons

I mean if the Aon was drawn out on paper, then maybe completed with one of the glowing lines so you could re-use the drawing.

It doesn't necessarily have to be the chasm line, you can just draw any incomplete Aon, then finish it and cause it to take effect, no? I get what you're saying, but given the second WoB, it makes it sound like an Elantrian could just grab a picture of an Aon, 'activate' it in some way, and have it work just fine. That was the basis for my answer, but I just can't think of how else an Elantrian could activate an Aon. Anybody can draw it, based on the WoBs, I'm just unsure if touching it with Intention will be enough to activate it. That's why I specified having the Aon be incomplete by just a single crucial line, which the Elantrian can finish to activate it. What are you sourcing the "Intent from the beginning" requirement, by the way? I mean Aons that are physically written down by pencil and such, not the floating lines of light.

My understanding of it is that so long as he Intends to activate the Aon, all he would need to do is draw the chasm line and that should set the Aon off. That is, after all, what he did with the massive Aon Rao that is Elantris and its surrounding cities, and that worked just fine. So long as an Elantrian "flips the switch", any Aon drawn can channel the Dor. If you personally drew an Aon perfectly in pencil on paper and handed it to an Elantrian, they could just add the chasm line (in any way, be it in pencil, by cutting a slit into the paper, or by drawing a glowing line on it with their hand, or any other number of ways) and it would activate the Aon. Intent matters only in the end. That would be a really good way to utilize Aons, actually, drawing it on a piece of paper and finishing it with a hand-drawn glowing line on it so it does whatever it does, and then the line vanishes and you're left with a nearly complete Aon once again. It would be really useful since you wouldn't have to draw the Aon from scratch every time. Unless channeling the Dor uses up whatever Aon you use, regardless of medium, but given that walls and such in Elantris were engraved with Aon Ashe and remained lit 24/7, that probably isn't the case.

Same here :sobbing: In that case, I concede. What you're saying is totally possible. Meta reasons convoluting character motivations always throws me for a loop ;-; Good point. Let's ignore God metals for a moment. Yes, Allomancy is different in regards to the origin of the power, but the main link I'm making is that storing may be like burning, where you don't need to have a specific Intent for what exactly needs to happen. One action made by you, where the result is determined by what you're performing the action on (the metal). A Full Feruchemist has 16 keys. When they store something, all of those keys are simultaneously applied to the 'lock', but only one actually unlocks the metaphorical lock, and that determines what charge is able to go through and charge the metal. Keys may not be the best metaphor for what I'm trying to convey since you can only ever fit one key into a lock at a time. How about this: Let's say (disregarding real-world chemistry for a moment) you have a solution of water, salt, and sugar. If you run the solution through Filter #1, only water and sugar will be allowed through, and salt will be left behind. If you use Filter #2, only water and salt are let through, and sugar is left behind. This is my model of Feruchemy (let's call it the Filter Model), where storing something (the analog for pouring) isn't different in any of the 16 different cases, and it's the in-built filter in the metal which automatically lets only the specific attribute through. You have a solution of 16 different solutes in water, each of which will only have one corresponding filter, and when you pour the solution into a given filter, it's not the pouring making a difference, but the filter. This is the difference between how I think of it and how you think of it. I think of it as the Filtration Model, where you have one solution of 16 specific solutes, and you pour that into the filtered container, where the filter lets the right one in. You're thinking of it this way: Instead of a solution with 16 pre-determined solutes in it, you have to choose which solute you put in the water first, then pour that solution with only the single solute in. Let's call this the Pre-preparation Model. If this is indeed how Feruchemy works, then you would be right and you would need specific Intent to first separate the attribute you want to store in your mind, then store it. My question is this: If only one solute can go through a given filter, and there are only 16 specific solutes in the first place, what's the need for choosing one solute, putting it and only it into the water, then pouring that specific solution, when you could just have one solution with all 16 solutes in it, and pour that one into however many different filters you want, knowing you'll get the same result as picking the specific solute first? The Pre-preparation Model completely ignores the metal's in-built filtering properties. For something like the Fullmind, I could see where your argument would work. The Fullmind wouldn't have a filter beyond only letting in viable attributes, so how does it know what to store? That's where you would need to decide which specific attribute you want to store. That's where you would need Intent. But when every other metal only allows for a single attribute anyway, why the need to choose the attribute first? Just as Brass and Steel would burn the same but produce different effects based on the molecular structure of the metal, storing would be the same, and the metal's structure determines what's let in. How would a regular person make contact with a Shard, though? That would tell you what stores what, sure, but realistically only specific people can communicate with the Shards, and the Shards aren't likely to tell you. Harmony's already seen the effects of pampering humanity, I doubt he'd just give them answers anymore. It's theoretically possible, but practically impossible. As for the whole guessing thing, I get the premise of what you mean, and if Feruchemy works through the Pre-preparation Model then that would indeed be the ideal way to find new attributes and stuff. But the thing is, an attribute could be anything. You could store anything from how well your organs function to how flexible you are to whether or not you're constipated. It's an unending list where you don't know whether the attribute you've come up with is simply not viable or if you're just trying to store it in the wrong metal. And there are a lot of metals, so you'd have to make a list of different alloys, then come up with an attribute and test that on each and every single alloy, over and over and over again. With something like a Fullmind, that would honestly just take ages. It's not quite as futile as I originally thought, but it would still be incredibly difficult and I can't imagine it working more than once or twice, and that's if you're insanely lucky. It would just be easier in every single way for Feruchemy to work through something like the Filtration Model, where you can store and tap once you have a metal (or the Fullmind, with the Intent of using it to store as if it were that metal). The "until you're told which key is the right one, even the right one won't unlock the lock" bit was me saying that if Feruchemy works through the Filtration Model, you'd already have the right 'solute' (the attribute) in you, as well as a filter that filters everything but that specific solute (the metal), so if at that point specific Intent was required, it would be like the right key not opening the lock until you know that it's the right key, which can't happen until you use it to open the lock, and you just end up stuck in a paradox where the only way out is for a Shard to tell you which key is the right one, which as I've mentioned is very unlikely. But Feruchemy isn't nearly so specific; you don't need to insert a small object in a small opening, you just need to be touching a metal and want to store something in it. That's why I switched to the Filter and Solute metaphor since I'd imagined the key metaphor as fitting all the keys into the lock simultaneously (since Investiture is formless) with only one of them working, but in hindsight, that wouldn't be intuitively obvious, which is, again, why I've now switched to the Filter and Solute analog. You're right, of course. That's just not the point I'm making. What I was saying was that Allomancy doesn't require specific Intent like other Invested Arts; In some cases, just the will to survive is enough to trigger burning. I was comparing that low level of required Intent to Feruchemy. Obviously, Feruchemy needs more Intent that Allomancy. As you said, being unconscious or injured might be enough to induce you to tap a Metalmind, but not much beyond that. You need to understand storing and tapping on at least a subconscious level to use Feruchemy. But I don't think it requires the specificity of Intent to the extent you're suggesting. It makes a nice pattern in the Metallic Arts, too. Allomancy is end-positive, and requires little Intent, at least not to use it at the basic level. Feruchemy is end-neutral and requires a fair bit of Intent since you need to actively know what you're doing and want to store or tap. I don't see how you could figure out Feruchemy accidentally like you could Allomancy. Hemalurgy is end-negative and requires a lot of precision and Intent. There are reasons for the level of Intent required, I think. Allomancy draws the power externally but from within yourself, by swallowing metal and using it as a conduit, and it doesn't require finesse, so it can be easy to use subconsciously. Feruchemy on the other hand draws power from you yourself, so you need to have enough conscious awareness of it that you can purposefully store and tap it, not to mention you need to have the metals on you to do it. Hemalurgy is entirely external and requires ripping a chunk of someone's soul off by impaling them, then impaling yourself with said stolen soul fragment. Since the soul is complicated and different parts of it do different things, you need to be very careful and exact with it, which is why it requires very specific Intent. It's possible, but I think that it's just worded that way to let the reader catch onto what it is; Nicrosil to make them realize it's a Medallion, then Copper to work out that it's a Coppermind, whereupon Wax begins seeing the memory. I think it may be less a showing of how Intent works in relation to Medallions and more just a structure device to make sure the readers aren't confused. I'm hurt, Alder. Surely you've known me long enough by now to know that I drop everything to discuss something that catches my fancy Ruin being powerful doesn't make a difference, I don't think. Hemalurgy doesn't make use of Ruin's Investiture, it just steals someone else's. Ruin's power is that he commands an unthinkable amount of Investiture. If Hemalurgy worked by way of Ruin's Investiture, he could totally jackknife the system that way, but it doesn't. Beyond having a perfect and intrinsic knowledge of bind points and such, Ruin can't influence Hemalurgy. His only intervention in this situation was indirect, but somehow, that was enough. I have more to say about this, it'll be lower down, near the end of this post. That's just me being very, very stupid. When I wrote that originally, I had meant to say steal something from a guy, and I landed on A-Pewter. Except I hadn't specified the person was a Misting, so after writing it out I went back and changed it from just some random person to a Misting; only, I forgot that I'd specified A-Pewter, and instead called the person a Coinshot. Silly mistake on my part, The real question was what would happen if the Hemalurgist passerby witnessed a Coinshot being accidentally spiked for his A-Steel. Again, I say more about this specific situation down below. As for what would happen if you tried to steal the wrong thing, Stell and Pewter have very close (maybe even the same) stealing point, so I think you'd end up with A-Steel despite the Intent being for A-Pewter. If not, you'd end up with a soul fragment in the spike that does nothing, or stole some attribute from the dead guy, depending on where exactly you stabbed the Coinshot. The metal itself (ignoring the Fullmind) only accepts one attribute. It knows what can be put inside. Again with the Filtration Model, storing would just try to press all attributes against the metal at once, and only the right one goes in. Fair, but the Bands ran out pretty quickly given how we see the characters use it, so there can't have been too much in there. I will admit, my real interest in the Fullmind was more for researching new metals, I didn't give the combat aspect much thought. Through Connection juice, or whatever we call it. Haven't done much research into the orb. Hmmmm.... Yes but Atium is alloyed with regular old Electrum, which is assumedly what's locking the 'anybody can burn it' aspect. If you alloy it with another God Metal, I don't really see why it shouldn't be counted as pure enough to be burned. I get that bit now, @therunner explained it quite well. The only special thing about Lift is that she metabolizes food into Lifelight. God Beyond help us if Lift gets her hands on a Compounded to the brim Bendalloy Medallion. And the Nightwatcher is just a Spren, the whole Boon/Curse thing doesn't seem like an outright magic system, at least from what we've seen of it. Still, I'm looking forward to more Cultivation content. Theoretically, there should be 7 different magic systems on Roshar: One for Honor, one for Odium, and one for Cultivation, then one that's a balance between Odium and Honor, one that's a balance between Honor and Cultivation, one that's a balance between Cultivation and Odium, and one that's a balance between all three. They're quite different, given that that burning them seems to have an effect regardless of whether the Identity matches. SA I don't think Intent requires you to physically be the one driving the action. That was the case with Ruin, but it might not be the only way. We see from Unsealed/Unkeyed Metalminds that even if you don't want to use the Metalmind, you need to know what it is to be able to sense the Investiture in there. Brandon's answer as to why you need to realize its nature first is Intent, so at some level, awareness is an aspect of Intent, or Intent somehow is awareness or leads to it. We see in (SA) If you still don't think the presence of a Hemalurgist who witnesses the accident happening and understands a spike should have been made should make a spike, fair enough. But what if the Hemalurgist was there the whole time, anticipates what's about to happen, and wants a spike to be made, even though he has absolutely no hand in how or why the Coinshot gets impaled, would a spike be made? It really was very clever. You took disparate, seemingly unimportant WoBs and somehow put together a whole argument that was wholly sound. Takes out-of-the-box thinking, I'm genuinely impressed. @alder24, watch out, you have competition

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They shouldn't be pulsing at all if they're just sitting there. Could Preservation have set it up specifically to pulse in a "Hearable" way, despite its static nature? Also, Alendi, who was a Seeker, was able to hear the Well, and presumably, so could any of the people who had used the Well before him, who were presumably also Seekers. Were the people who were born with the seeds for Allomancy just really powerful back then? I can't see that being the case, but how else to explain it? Alendi was said to have donned the "Piercings of the Hero" (which Brandon said were a fabrication by Ruin to let him manipulate Alendi further), how likely would it have been that one (or many) of them were Hemalurgic spikes granting A-Bronze? Allomancy was barely known and wasn't understood back then, so what are the odds that Alendi had either figured Bronze out and was actively burning it to be able to always hear the Well pounding, or just had enough trace amounts of it in him to subconsciously burn constantly, plus the discovery of enough other Seekers by Ruin to spike their Allomancy out? I think that once the Well was full for a while, the pulsing got strong enough that any Seeker could hear it (though it wouldn't have reached that point before Vin uses it in WoA, since no other Seeker can sense it during her time), or maybe it's just misinterpreted and anyone Connected enough to Preservation could hear it. That's honestly a good idea, but I don't think Ruin's mind was concentrated there. He describes his imprisonment as one of impotence, where anything he tried to do was automatically resisted by Preservation's Investiture, so maybe he was free to move around and view different things, just not affect anything except in minute ways. Then again, the pulses of Ruin's Investiture seemed to have stemmed from the well in SH, but that might just be Kelsier feeling the pulses coming from the SR, since he was in a Perpendicularity, and the SR is where Ruin's mind would truly be, hence where the commands carried by the pulses were coming from, and not the physical location of the Well. Maybe, since Preservation used up his mind to create the Well, which we know was the focal point for Ruin's prison, that alone was enough to cause the pulsing, like you said. Doesn't explain how/why some people can hear it, but it does explain the origin quite soundly.

But Ruin's manipulations behind the scenes were enough to spike Spook with Pewter Allomancy, even though the person who actually did the spiking was not aware. I think a spike would be made. My point only applies if Identity doesn't factor in, that's what I was trying to get across. I always interpreted that as the metal being used up as the gateway to the SR, but since the metal was actually Investiture itself (which can't be destroyed), it would be sent back to the Pits to be reformed, without having ever had any part in the Allomancy itself. I'm guessing now that case was instead that it fueled the Allomancy, then went to the Pits to be reformed, since Investiture can't really be destroyed: the closest it's ever gotten is Anti-Investiture, where it just turns into energy. So it goes to the Pits, because it wouldn't be destroyed and anything else would just mean the Investiture would go to Ruin and he could use it. Well, shoot. I really didn't expect that one, that's some amazing analysis on your part. Identity would definitely block you from burning the Honorblades. I wonder if the Breaths weren't keyed to the Allomancer, would the metal act as a Metalmind and it would just burn regularly, and the Breaths are lost (maybe gained by the Allomancer), or if the Breath-imbued metal would just be impervious to burning as we see here? Also, @alder24, I found a WoB confirming that the Well no longer exists:

That one really confused me, I was going to make a post about it literally two seconds before you posted that. Oh, dear. What on earth are those dang Gnats and Leechers doing??

Whatever it is that Chromium and Aluminium are doing, would it kill the Spren if it was powerful enough? I was under the impression that Chromium/Aluminum convert the metals into Investiture, it would just dismiss the Spren instead of killing it.

Fair argument. Tin seems to store the quality of the sense as opposed to the sense itself, though this gets a little fuzzy at the extreme end of storing. Storing Sight doesn't seem to make you blind, it just gives you varying degrees of worse eyesight. If Tin stored the sense itself, then I think I'd side with @Koloss17, and the Investiture would bridge the gap for something like that.

If they could burn Aluminum while the Shardblade was going through them, they could make the Blade (at the very least the bit currently passing through them) vanish. This would probably force the Spren out of their Blade form and back into however they usually manifest in the PR, but wouldn't hurt them (permanently). Nothing lasting, so far as we can tell. Well, it wouldn't just make them immune to it. They'd have to burn Aluminum while the Shardblade passed through them, and they'd have to swallow more each time. So far as we can tell, it is the same. Probably wouldn't, but we can never be too sure. The Surgebinder should be unaffected unless we just non-existed the Spren, in which case the Surgebinder would be horrifically traumatised and lose their powers, as well as maybe becoming something akin to a Drab. Honestly, it's a good way to disorient and take a Shardbearer by surprise. It would definitely work way better on someone with a Deadblade, since you'd need to refill your Aluminum reserve, but still, it's been a while since someone found a legit use for Aluminium. Kudos

The fact that he calls out it's pure makes it seem like there is something special about having a very pure form of God Metal. I figured, but so far, do we know what it is? Koravellium it is! I don't think being a spike changes anything other than the "Weird effects" mentioned in that one WoB, and I don't know why people keep conflating burning spikes with burning Metalminds since we know exactly what burning a Metalmind does and that burning a spike would be different. You make a good point though, at this point in time the Scadrians just don't know the true nature of God metals. This has got me thinking though, Is there any way you could get rid of a Hemalurgic charge? My first thought was Anti Tones, but which Shard's Anti Tone do you use? There isn't any actual Ruin-polarised Investiture going on in Hemalurgy, so I doubt that would work. Also, how come Raysium never self-destructed while it was carrying Anti-Voidlight? Shouldn't that have caused it to immolate, given that it's solid Odium-polarised Investiture? I'm eternally grateful for you guys, I'm so bad at keeping track of spoilers. Thanks again, I edited it

I feel bad because it looks like you're getting upset over this. You haven't convinced me, but we can stop debating it if it brings you peace of mind. It doesn't disprove your idea outright, it's just self-contradictory. Why tell Spook what the metals are and do, then tell him to see if he can find out what they are and what they do? Yes, but... What does that have to do with the conversation? See, the 'searching for a metal reserve' is a bit of a weak argument, since we have plenty of examples of metals being burned instinctively. Take a look at it this way. Each metal only does one thing. Vin doesn't know what Aluminum does, but all she has to do is burn it once it's force-fed to her and her metals vanish, no need to know what it does. Same thing with Feruchemy. Why do you need to specifically know what you want to store in that metal when the metal only stores one thing anyway? The metal's molecular structure is itself the key that determines what charge is stored, all you need to do is provide it. It's like having a bunch of keys, not knowing which one unlocks the lock, and until you're told which key is the right one, even the right one won't unlock the lock. It doesn't make sense. I posit that 'storing' is universal, just like 'burning' is, and it's the metal itself that determines the difference. You don't Intend to burn Brass any differently than Steel. It's not how you burn that makes the difference, but the metal being burned. I argue that it's the same for storing. Let's discuss Intent for a second. I see Intent as the sort of unconscious desire or awareness of what's going on/what you're hoping will happen that determines whether or not something can happen. Waxillium doesn't know that Unsealed Metalminds are a thing, and so he has no Intent related to them. This means that he doesn't even sense that the one he holds is Invested. Some Invested Arts require specific Intent, like Hemalurgy, Forgery, Awakening, etc. For example, the right metal could pierce someone in the right place, but that won't make it a Hemalurgic spike on its own. Allomancy, and as I'm suggesting, Feruchemy, don't require nearly quite so much Intent. Just the body's will to survive counts as enough Intent to trigger Allomancy subconsciously, and as I said earlier, once you know what Allomancy is, you don't need to know what a metal does to be able to burn it. Why should this not be the case with Feruchemy? With something like a Fullmind, I'd understand, since it can store so many different attributes, you'd need to single out a specific one that is also viable to be able to store it, but with the regular metals that only store a single type of charge anyway, I don't see why that should be the case. I don't think so. Wax realized it was an Unsealed Metalmind, and that's what allowed him to tap it. Marasi seeing more than one metal in the spearhead made her realize that the spearhead was the Bands of Mourning. The individual metals didn't give her a mental list of what he could and couldn't do, which she then referred to. Tapping from something like the Bands or a Fullmind would definitely require Intent since it contains more than one metal in it, but that shouldn't apply to a single Metalmind. Let's try a thought experiment. Say a Coinshot gets stabbed in the heart with a steel spike accidentally in a way that should steal Pewter Allomancy. If nobody there knows about Hemalurgy, the spike will pretty obviously remain a regular spike and nothing out of the ordinary would happen. Now, let's go over the same scenario, but the person who caused the accident was a Hemalurgist and Intended for a spike to be made. Again, obviously, a spike would be made. But what if the accident happens, and a random passerby who happens to be a Hemalurgist sees the whole thing happen, and recognizes even before the Coishot gets impaled that a spike would be made? He didn't have anything to do with the events, but he knows how to use Hemalurgy and knows that what happened should create a viable Hemalurgic spike. Is one made? Keep in mind while you think about this that SA I'm not suggesting that they store and tap everything at once. What I had in mind was deciding on a specific alloy, say Atium-Cadmium, then storing in the Fullmind with the Intent of storing whatever attributes Atium-Cadmium stores, to see what changes would happen and work backward to figure out what the attribute is. it would take time to just intuit what the attribute is, and once you know what it is, it would require further testing to find the parameters of that attribute. Once you figure it out, Hooray! You now know what another metal does! You can then decide on another alloy, and repeat the process. This doesn't make the Fullmind any more powerful than it is with what you suggest, but it's infinitely more useful for research purposes. The only difference between my version and yours is that you could actually make scientific progress with the Fullmind, whereas in your version you'd just have to sit and around and wait to be told what a metal does, which doesn't change the status quo at all, since that's what we're already doing. And remember, even if you know every attribute and can store and tap everything as you suggest, you're still limited by the size of the Fullmind itself. I can't imagine you'd have more than one, maybe two, and both would be of modest size. In those two Metalminds, you'd have to pick from all of those attributes just a small handful that you can store in amounts that would actually be useful in a fight. Take one of the normal attributes, like health. It's insanely useful, but it won't help you much if you only have enough stored to heal a single bullet wound. Unless you're a Full Feruchemist, you could only use one of the regular 16 anyway, and you'd have to choose carefully between the one's you'd have discovered, the discovery of which alone is a time-consuming and menial in the first place. Its entire purpose was so there would be someone to renew Ruin's prison and be there to take care of the world in Preservation's absence. Why would Sazed make a huge chunk of Preservation's power unavailable to himself, when its not even needed, and he already has a Perpendicularity in the South? The problem here is that there are too many limitations. A few make the novel interesting. This many would stagnate progress, which is crucial in a series where the core idea is watching the world and the magic evolved over 3 (now 4) eras. Cosmere spoilers It's important because it was a hint that Atium and Malatium weren't the true external temporal metals. A physical metal doesn't have to be immediately obvious anyway. Cadmium stores breath, so maybe Malatium stored something like electrolyte or mineral levels in the body, something which Sazed would have no way of knowing. Thinking of it that way, maybe Sazed did manage to notice something, he just maybe didn't know enough to figure out what it was with the knowledge he had access to. And again, Atium alloys can't be thought of as setting any pattern, and we don't really have any proof that the sets of 16 made of God Metals follow the quadrant system, or even that they're evenly spread out in said quadrants. They could, sure, but there's just nothing outright saying it. All we have to go on is intuition here, and Brandon has explicitly said that a lot of things in the Cosmere are counter-intuitive. That's doesn't narrow anything down at all, since any attributes you could possibly store would fall into one of those anyway. You can, actually. Some Invested Arts just require it to be more specific than others. Hemalurgy, Forgery, Aondor, ChayShan, Awakening, all need specific Intents. Things like Allomancy, Surgebinding, and if I'm right, Feruchmy, just require a basic level of it. Besides, once you get a good handle on the Theory of a magic system, you get better at doing things like reverse engineering and deduction. Allomancy is reactionary, has a Push for every Pull, so Vin automatically knows that's if Aluminum is Allomantically viable, it has to have an alloy; Whereby she begins commissioning a metallurgist to make alloys for her, finds the right one, then figures out exactly what it does through trial and error and applying it to different situations, which I what I propose should be possible with Feruchemy. Surely it must be more complicated than that? SA Something I'm not getting here, why would Shardblades being alloys disrupt anything here? They're alloys with another God Metal, Koravellium, so I dont see how that changes things. The God Metal is Investiture (literally pure Honor-polarised Investiture in solid form), so it's the same effect either way. The point I'm making here is that Identity shouldn't affect burning in any way unless burning a God Metal specifically uses up the Investiture that the God Metal is made of. Doesn't it? Do you have a source for that one? I've always thought it's the metallic structure of the metal that caused the effect, like the normal metals

So, it's to do with the nature of God Metals, Lerasium in particular. Each God metal has one unique property, something that it does. For example, Raysium, Odium's God Metal, conducts Investiture. Trellium/Bavadinium, Autonomy's God Metal, repels other sources of Investiture. We don't know the passive properties of most God Metals, though. The second thing relevant about God Metals is that all of them and all of their alloys have applications in the Metallic Arts, and are said to be burnable by "anyone". What this means is unclear. 'Anyone' may refer to any sapient creature in the Cosmere with the Intent of burning the metal Allomantically, or to anyone who is Scadrian or has Scadrian heritage, or more specifically any Allomancer, regardless of which type they are. I personally think the first one is unlikely, and one of the latter two is the true case, but it could be any of the three. Burning Lerasium, for example, forges a permanent Connection to Preservation, which has the side effect of making you a Mistborn. Burning Pure Atium allows you to glimpse the Spiritual Realm, like the Shards. Burning Atium-Electrum (which is Atium as it was known in Era 1) shows you what someone else will do in the immediate future. Burning Atium-Gold (Malatium) shows you a version of someone's past, or who they would be if they had made different choices. Burning any of the 16 Lerasium alloys with the regular metals will forge a Connection between you and Preservation in a way that makes you a Misting of the metal you alloyed the Lerasium with as a side effect. We don't know what Honor's God Metal (Tanavastium) does when burned or used in Hemalurgy/Feruchemy, but it could do anything from letting you glimpse the Cognitive Realm to letting you fly and vomit rainbows. We just don't know. What we were discussing there is that Lerasium, when alloyed with another God Metal, gives you a powerful Connection to the Shard whose metal you alloyed and burned, and this typically gives you access to that Shard's magic system. What would happen if you alloyed Lerasium with Tanavastium and burned it? Normally, this should give you access to Honor's magic system, which is Surgebinding. Except, Surgebinding requires the consent of a Spren. That's where the theorizing comes in, and that's what Alder and I were discussing. Tanavastium's Allomantic effect is separate from what burning Lerasium alloyed with Tanavastium. You're misunderstanding. You can burn a Hemalurgic spike or Metalmind for the regular effect you'd get from that metal (so burning a Steel Hemalurgic spike or a Steel Metalmind would let you see the blue lines and Push on metals), you just can't get anything extra from burning it. If Sazed was an Allomancer as well as a Feruchemist, he could store a little bit of speed in a Steel Metalmind, then burn that Metalmind, and instead of the blue lines and Pushing on metals, the speed in the Metalmind would get multiplied many times over, far more than what you originally put in, and he could get unlimited speed by storing that speed and repeating the process, letting him use way more speed than any other Feruchemist without ever needing to store speed himself beyond that little bit. That's what the Lord Ruler did, and that's what we call Compounding. However, if Vin burned that same Steel Metalmind, she would get regular old Pushing metals Steel, no speed, because her Identity doesn't match Sazed's Identity, which is what the speed in the Metalmind is keyed to. It doesn't mean she couldn't burn that metal at all. This doesn't work the way you're thinking. You would probably need a Connection to Honor to be able to burn the Honorblade (like Alder and I were discussing), but Identity doesn't affect burning at all. The God Metal itself could be burnable if you get the right Connection, but Identity won't stop you from burning the metal once you did. The reason Identity doesn't affect burning is that you're not drawing the Investiture of the metal itself, which is indeed keyed to the Spren or Honorblade, you're using the atomic structure of the metal itself to tell the Spiritual Realm what the Investiture you're going to be drawing will do. Steel tells the Spiritual Realm to make the Investiture show you the blue lines and Push on the metal you specify. Tin tells the SR to make the Investiture extend your senses. The actual Investiture of the Metal (and it's Identity) won't hinder you at all, as it doesn't factor into what you're doing.

As you should!!!! I'll be your high priest, your holiness. All hail!