Through the Living Heir

"I don't. But it is cold up here. I think our first priority should be a fire. Three of them, actually." he turns to the others. "Look around for medium sized rock and fallen trees. Make sure we're all in sight of at least one person."

"My apologies. This is to the death, if you recall."

"This may take a while."

"Who made this stupid map? It has no legend at all, and no scale. It's just a bunch of landmarks." "Agreed. We all have backpacks; we can use them to carry our stuff."

“Do you know how to read maps? Because I do.” DragonHeir continues rustling around in the backpack. Checking the pouch on the strap, he finds a compass. (I can do that, right?)

“SIMON is only connected to my brain at five points: he can hear and see what I do; he can add visuals and audio, which aren’t real and thus cannot obscure my vision or hearing; and he can hear active thoughts if I send them to him - I need to practice doing that before it will work.” “You’re on for that, once this storm stops. And I’ll get started on the advisor glasses - I’m going to start with SIMON as a template, but then you can make suggestions for preferences.”

“I’m Dragonheir. And, no, we should not. We should have a firm plan in place before we start, otherwise we’ll run out of supplies or get lost or something.” “Is that a map?”

“I guess I’ll have to go for you, then,” Veer says, launching the ball around halfway through his sentence.

“I did, but the main function of the glasses was SIMON. If the glasses got too far away, this new body would stop working, so his system is directly in my head now. I do have enough metal to construct some new ones for you four, if you still want them.” @The Stormfather, did Nick’s experiment work? He left a quasi-xenosuit and the glasses near the gray people to see if they came with him.

“That might legitimately poison me.” “Nick, you can eat anything now.” “Never mind. I’ll take it, I guess.” Suddenly, you realize something: Nick’s glasses are gone.

“I don’t know what that means, but then at least someone would know what’s going on. The only experience I have with being teleported is Wikipedia articles and a play by post roleplay.” Dragon (or Dray or whatever) checks his backpack as well.

“How should I know? Anyway, I can’t bring myself back to life many more times. The changes add up, and it’s very difficult to actually revert me to full human. We’re not meant to grow fast, so converting me back would take a lot of messing around that would make me even less like myself.”

Veer begins to bounce a corn ball at what is essentially an invisible wall in the air, creating more plants when it hits his hand but also building up speed. “If I kill him, do I win?”

Nick is indeed radiating a worrying amount of heat. His suit starts to crumble, somehow, cracking off in sections which fall apart further as they hit the ground. He’s got his hood up, and the area beneath the crumbling outer layer is colorful. They’re familiar colors; a blueish white, a bright yellow, and a blue-green. His wings fold behind him, and he sighs. “Theoretically I’m Nick. They put me into a volcano, which essentially killed me. SIMON had to rebuild my body from scratch in order to bring me back.” He pulls the hood off, and he still looks the same, but the texture of his skin is slightly strange. In fact, much of him lies just this side of uncanny valley: he’s moving slightly too fast, and not blinking enough. “My body is pretty much the same; when SIMON could, he actually made it better. I’ll heal faster, move faster, and be tolerant to extreme temperatures. All of me is more efficient.” His shoulders slump. “The one thing that’s not the same is my brain. Human minds - any sapient’s mind, actually - are incredibly complex. They’re hard to get quite right. I still have the same memories, but my brain chemistry is a little different, which will change my personality a bit. Some people have argued the thesusing makes you a different person.” Nick springs away, moving faster than he should but tripping, not used to his own speed. “I’ll hug you in a moment. I was just in an active volcano; touching me will burn you.” Having an idea, he takes his moon crystal and performs an exorcism, then hugs Kaleb.

“I’m confused. Do they get resurrections too?” Veer sends the balls back with his powers, then serves a third corn ball.

Big crunch

“Is that a backpack that you own? Cause mine is. I wasn’t wearing it earlier, though.” “No. We need to stick together; otherwise one of us could get lost. We’ll go at a good pace, and see if we can find some food.”

“I’m a life scout. I can probably keep us alive, at least for a bit.” Dragon takes out his phone, finding (unsurprisingly) that there’s no service (I assume).

Dragon looks around. “I think we have two choices. We can go down. Or we can go up.” Noticing he’s wearing his red backpacking backpack, something he hadn’t been wearing before, he looks inside, seeing that it’s empty. “Weird.” “Yeah. It’s probably easier to built a signal on the top; we can flag down a plane or something.”

“Hunger games… that sounds ominous.” Veer puts another corn ball from his side into play.

“Huh. I was walking to the bus for my cross country meet.”

Dragonheir is in the middle of walking to the cross country bus when, with a flash of light and a bang, he is transported to the mountain, surrounded by a few people. “Who are you?”

Yup. It's lurg.

Ok. Cosmere:

Hello! Welcome to the Shard! In my opinion, at least, Sanderson's other books definitely match the expectations. In fact, Mistborn is actually one of his first books; his writing actually improves as he goes on. Of course, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think Sanderson's writing was awesome, so you'll be getting some selection bias here. As for a next step, he's got an epic fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive, which I think might fulfill your request for more mature. Its magic system isn't quite as rule based as Mistborn's; the powers are still rigorously defined, but they have multiple related uses, rather than the sort of "point and click" that allomancy possesses. However, it has much more in-depth worldbuilding; Sanderson created an entire planet full of magic that feels like it could really exist. It also has more main characters, a more complex plot, and more moral quandaries than Mistborn, although there still is plenty of real-seeming magical battles where limits are defined rather than arbitrarily enforced for the plot. (The outcome is still arbitrarily enforced by the plot; that's how books work, but it doesn't feel like it.) In my opinion, Sanderson's only books that don't quite live up to the expectations created by Mistborn are Elantris and Warbreaker. I believe that both of those were written before it, and thus aren't quite as good (Warbreaker is significantly better than Elantris, though). They're still OK fantasy, but they're not Sanderson tier; I think he learned a lot while writing them. I'd only recommend reading Elantris when you've already read several Sanderson books; it has some interesting information lore-wise (all of Sanderson's adult books take place in one universe, which is called the Cosmere. Many of the people here find patterns between magic systems and extrapolate them, because the magic all follows the same base rules), but, due to its early writing quality, it can cause people who would have really enjoyed other Sanderson books to stop reading. Warbreaker is better; it's a fine book, but I prefer other series and, given what you said, I think you would too. Another thing you'd want to be careful of is that Mistborn takes a complete tone shift between the end of the first trilogy and the book that takes place after it. That also has a tendency to make people stop reading. Spoilers for the first Mistborn trilogy: Anyway, I should probably wrap this up before other sharders steal all my points (grr ΨιτιsτηεΒέsτ). I'm glad that we have another Sanderson reader and Shard member, and I hope you enjoy whatever book you pick next. -Dragonheir