Underwater_Worldhopper

The Leecher isn't forcing an Allomancer to burn their metals, because burning the metals necessarily means that the Allomancer should draw power from them, and if that was the case, A-Chromium would have the exact same effect as A-Nicrosil. But it doesn't. It's the Leecher's powers searching for Allomantically viable metals in the body of the target, converting them into Investiture and pulling it away, and returning it to the SR. A-Chromium isn't forcing the body of the target to Burn the metals, they themselves are getting rid of it. The target's abilities, or their Spiritweb, don't enter the equation. So If a Leecher Leeched Wayne, and he had eaten Bendalloy, Gold, and Steel, it would burn away all three, regardless of which one he actually had the ability to Burn, and regardless of which ones he was Burning at the time. Same for a Non-Allomancer. Hope that clears it up Edit: I just thought to clarify, a Leecher cannot Leech any metals that aren't Allomantically viable, however.

Seems like a solid theory, reinforced by the fact that Hoid uses some form of Fortune to figure out where and when to be to influence all the different important events on different planets he shows up on. In addition, it also shows that regular uses of Fortune aren't always accurate, as there's a WoB I can't find right now that says that Hoid sometimes shows up on a planet, sticks around for a little while, realizes that nothing novel-worthy is happening and leaves, so I suppose Compounding or using large stores of Fortune would make it more and more accurate.

Ruin does have a gaseous form of his investiture, it's the black mists in the storage cavern under Luthadel that Vin and Elend walk through at the end of Well of Ascension to get to the room with the Well in it. Beyond that, the Coppermind says that in Era 2 'darker mists' come out at some night instead of the regular white ones, though I don't recall if we've seen them in an actual book yet

I just thought of something. Could the Resonance be making a Connection with someone in your Coppercloud and granting them immunity to Emotional Allomancy as well as/instead of you?

An Ambassador, Dealer or Negotiater, maybe? Immune to emotional Allomancy, hidden from detection, makes quicker connections with people for your purposes? Seems like a pretty good combination for someone who acts as a mediator, someone who can't be emotionally influenced, and someone who can influence someone through connection in ways they might not be trained to detect, or something like a Drug dealer or something similarly illegal, where you could hide yourself from being Allomantically detected and also make quick connections with people to make them buy your stuff?

Ah, that makes more sense!

True, Kelsier's spirit was pinned to a body by a hemalurgic spike; However, that one always felt a bit off to me (as in it's a use of Hemalurgy we havent seen before), and I'm not sure it counts as piercing a Cognitive Shadow in the way that we're trying to. Really, it's a body being spiked in a way that allows Kelsier to puppet it around, not Kelsier himself being spiked (Although now that I think about it, could the way this was achieved have been to charge a spike with Kelsier (spike him in the Cognitive Realm with the intention of sucking his entire soul into the spike instead of tearing a specific chunk off), then put that spike into a body? If that's the case, that still doesn't provide a way for something to be spiked into kelsier's cognitive aspect).

That clears things up, thanks!

Can a creature made purely of investiture even be spiked? All of this hinges on Kelsier being able to receive a spike, and I'm not sure he could. Hemalurgy works by excising and grafting pieces of people's spiritwebs, which are made out of Investiture. Kelsier and Spren are Investiture. If a charged spike could even be physically driven into Kelsier, considering he's made of Investiture (which repels other Investure, like trying to force two north poles of a magnet together), the added Investiture would probably warp his entire being. I suppose you could spike connection out of a Spren, but that would probably tear a chunk out of them, so you'd have to kill a spren in a horrific way to even initiate the process.

"Suddenly I had another set of abilities that Hemalurgy had to be able to steal—the basic pieces of Preservation inside the souls of all men." Does that mean you couldn't take out regular human attributes out of non-Scadrians, since other humans wouldn't be created by Preservation and thus they wouldn't have that particular peice of innate investiture?

I'm so happy to see people discussing Gold and the less well-understood/talked-about metals, since recently I've been obsessing over what an A-Electrum savant would look like and be able to do. Now that Atium is functionally no longer a thing, A-Electrum doesn't have any obvious uses, a lot like A-Gold, save for some very specific situations. Could you train yourself to see fewer shadows so you could glean more information from specific ones? Could keeping an eye on them in a fight help you anticipate your own reactions ahead of time and change what you will do (like how Vin beat Zane)? Would they show you stumbling or getting injured so you could avoid doing the same? It's literally seeing the future, finding uses for it shouldn't be nearly this frustrating (but that's also why I love Brandon Sanderson). So, so many possibilities, even more questions, and regretfully few answers. Electrum rant aside, almost everything said in this thread makes sense. The combination of A-Gold and Identity is especially interesting to me. Store 50% of your identity away, and you're likely to get far more varied and distant versions of yourself. Store 75%, and you might get a Gold Shadow that never Snapped, or never had similarly life-altering experiences, or lived such a different life and were so far removed from who you are at the moment that they might as well be a different person altogether. However, I feel that if you stored 100% of your identity, you'd get blurry or an Atium/Electrum-esque Shadow (Like how Mistchemist16 said) or you might not produce one at all since you'd effectively be blanking your spiritual concept of Identity, which is (albeit assumedly) the basis for your Gold Shadow. The same thing is true in the opposite direction, where Tapping Identity would result in the Shadow being more and more like yourself, until at some point (Probably Tapping around 200% but not necessarily) where your Shadow is just you, or again, there may be no Shadow at all (This is unlikely though). As for the Everything Everywhere All At Once theory, I'm not entirely sure. It seems likely to me that you could borrow abilities/skills/knowledge from your Shadow through practice since we see in both instances of Gold being burned that the Allomancer has at least some level of instinctive/inherent knowledge of the Shadow's psyche, but those skills would be locked to only your mental capacity, and that could sometimes be problematic to utilize. For a real-world parallel, I used to be a gymnast a long time ago, and still have the exact muscle memory to do all the fancy flips and cartwheels that I was able to then; However, It's been long enough that my body has changed in enough ways that the muscle memory is no longer accurate, so anytime I try to recreate the flips now, what I experience is different from what my muscle memory says I should be experiencing, and that disconnect makes my brain panic and I just end up flailing mid-air and falling through the flip mid-way. For an in-world example... (SA) I can imagine it leading to some pretty funny scenarios of Augurs using the skills of a life-long warrior in a fight, only to fail miserably because they don't have enough training or endurance to use those skills effectively. Still, it has many uses, so props for figuring it out!