Through the Living Heir

@AltonicKeys “Larry, that’s probably raw energy. It hasn’t exploded yet, but I’d advise not cracking it until we’re sure what will happen. I can see if I can remove it, if you want.”

“Larry. Is that your name. I’m Vall.” he goes to shake his hand then notices the yellow line. “Huh. Looks like an elemental crystal or something. I might be able to change it a bit. It might explode, though. Let’s wait for other options.” “What organization are you a part of? I’m usually a freelancer. My last job was in the feywild.”

@Wierdo, what did your character have? Tondon takes any potentially useful objects from the tribute he didn’t even learn the name of, then feeds them to the Redspine. @BlueWildRye @Edema Rue Then, the ground starts shaking.

Don’t worry, your only weakness is silver. And now you’ve teamed up with a Lurcher. *evil laughter* By the way, on a scale of one to ten, how stabbed would I end up if I tried to ride the Redspine?

This just happened to me. So I guess I lost the game.

@BlueWildRye @Wierdo @WhyEverNot_8

Assuming Conner has a metal object, Tondon walks towards him, talking to the Redspine as he goes. “If you win, the Game Masters let you live in luxury. I could give you some of the money I get, and you’d never need to be hungry again.” @WhyEverNot_8 Tondon and the Redspine reach near Conner, and Tondon stores a ton of Connection, walks up to you, and stabs you in the heart with a silver dagger, without becoming noticeable again.

“Planet A-416. Interesting… Who is that talking?” Vall bites down on his force ball and it collapses.

“Thank you.” Tondon goes to shake the Redspine’s hand, then realizes that’s a terrible idea, and pull it back. “I’ve got three days of beef jerky. I’ll give you them now and go hunting. For tributes.” Tondon taps much of his Connection metalmind, extending the ironlines to an incredible degree for an instant. @Edema Rue where is the closest tribute with a metal object? Tondon points. “There’s a tribute that way. I have a feeling this partnership will be beneficial.”

“I’ve never seen one of those before… is it reusable?” Vall kneels down and flicks the ice with a fingernail. “Ok. Maybe I’ll teach you some accuracy exercises once we get rid of the murderous chickens. I can’t imagine that helmet helping you… where are you from, anyway? A Wildspace outpost or something?” Vall hits another chicken with his tail, and decides to level himself quasitransformed, as it’s less effort. More purple crystals coalesce around one of Vall’s fingertips, and he cuts a strip off his sleeve, binding his bleeding shins. He turns to the others and does the same.

Vall does his best to help Kaleb along. Then the chicken he swatted comes back. “Um, maybe we should deal with this before introductions.” His voice is slightly garbled from the bead of force in his mouth.

“How many dragons did you half to kill to make those things standard issue?” he looks in disbelief at how little of the lasers hit the chickens. (Larry has bad aim, so he’s missing frequently, right?) “Give me that! I’ve never fired one before, but I’m pretty sure I could use it. You’re gonna run out of charges! And what do you mean by what did I do?” Understood. I wonder how they ended up cannibalistic… I guess we’ll find out.

Can I hear about the magic? I can give feedback on it and how I think it would affect your world.

“Have these been coming the whole time?” Vall gains a tail made of floating purple crystals that grow into existence as it whips forward, slamming into the chicken that is trying to peck at his shins, which sends it angrily flapping backward (unless these are superchickens or something). As the crystals shrink and disappear, Vall opens his mouth and lights starts bending inside of it, showing a distorted view in all directions (most of which is just Vall’s mouth, but it’s called a breath weapon for a reason). He waits to actually launch the ball of force until it becomes clear he has to. Working up the power to do that is tiring, and he wants to save his energy in case he ends up facing an exponential amount of chickens.

“It’s a greeting where I come from, and most of the places I’ve traveled to as well. You grasp your acquaintance by the hand and then shake it. I’m not actually sure where it’s from…” he looks back at the smoldering chicken and the gruesome mess around the attic. “If you don’t know what’s happening here either, what would you say about trying to find out?”

Tondon’s eyes widen. “What? How? My iron! My metalmind!” But then, he disappears from notice, leaving the Redspine with an intense feeling of Deja Vu. What had it been doing here that was so important? It should be hunting, not loitering around. Then Tondon, having retrieved his fallen box and an iron vial, then drunk half of it, stops storing Connection, for of course that was what he was doing, and throws two silver daggers at the Redspine. He holds the vines tying the steel box in his left hand, and the iron vial in his right. “You will be very helpful to me, I think.”

Yeah (I read the thread but I didn’t have anything to add.). This person with the Well-level investiture would also be a soulcaster, though. A soilcaster with the capacity to turn the storming planet to whatever they want doesn’t even need any emergent powers. I think it needs to still be drawing some energy, the stormlight is just acting as a catalyst rather than being consumed in the process. Huh. That seems like it would mess some things up, thermodynamics wise. Your WoB says so, though. The issue is, that would mean that spren are also infinite, and that would mean that the investiture-anti investiture reaction used to kill a spren, which occurred on-screen, would create infinite energy. (Which didn’t happen, because the Cosmere hasn’t been consumed by a ball of plasma.) I’d been working under the assumption that the amount of stormlight that Honor possessed was extremely large but finite, and if that is the case all of it could be contained in perfect gemstones and prevented from returning back to the highstorm. Gemstones can’t be soulcasted directly, but the materials to make synthetic gemstones should be easy enough to create. The spores tap into the spiritual realm, using the water as a catalyst. Otherwise, it could only create an amount of vines the same weight as the water. The explosion of vines description implies that this is not the case. I don’t know why the first point matters, and we honestly don’t understand how nicrosil works. Storing both capacity and fuel have been implied to work. (A divine breath, at least, can be stored.) Our only source is medallions, which have been implied to work differently than ordinary metalborn abilities. Creating metal through soulcasting should be able to get around this easily, right? Investiture cannot both be transformed into energy or matter and return to the spiritual realm. If it changes form, as stated in one of your WoBs about infinite shards, it doesn’t also stay investiture, because then energy would have been added. If I burn something, the energy released doesn’t return to the wood, it’s been released. As for the Aons, it’s from an early draft, and is likely no longer canon, but is available on the website. (This was the original source of Elantris’s glow: self replicating Seons) It still might show a possibility, though.

“I’m Valavinc, but you can call me Vall.” he sticks out his hand so Kaleb can shake it. “Would you happen to have any idea what is going on?”

Vall raises his eyebrows. “Is that a topaz annihilator? And what did that chicken do to you? What’s going on here, anyway?” No, Topaz Annihilators are not weapons for killing Hoid.

If you use the investiture to do something, isn’t it adding energy to the system? If it then comes back, that breaks conservation of energy. The idea with draining it in the ways I described was that the siphoning would increase exponentially, which would mean that over time more and more power is drawn, eventually reaching the threshold of actually being significant. Even if you can’t shut down a shard, nigh infinite investiture is nothing to sneeze at. Also, if you were able to create perfect gemstones, wouldn’t it continuously emit light from the spiritual realm? That feels like it would work to create a significant investiture leak. (It’d also shine like the sun. Dyson Sphere time!)

Hi everyone! I was once again thinking about the Cosmere instead of my stroke technique during swim team practice, and I came up with a worrying idea; if you can draw out and store all the investiture in a shard, it might splinter them or even make them “un-ascend” or descend, I guess. Thus, I went about thinking of ways to exponentially or quadratically draw out increasing amounts of investiture from an otherwise closed system. I am unsure what the draining of a shard would cause, and will speculate a bit, but I’m hoping a better cosmere theorist than I has more knowledge about it. Methods to drain a shard: Soulcast functional gemstones, then fill them with a highstorm or bondsmith. This will definitely require more scientific knowledge than Roshar currently has access to, but surges could probably be used to accomplish modern artificial gem techniques. If you have a bondsmith, they could use adhesion, which is the surge of pressure, to flatten carbon into diamonds. (I think. I didn’t do any research.) There’s also something about smokestone being made by quartz and radiation. If you have access to limitless or near limitless materials to transform, you can turn those, or the soulcaster can turn their hand to the proper materials and then heal. Actually, if the carbon from human flesh can be refined into diamonds through magic, you don’t even need a soulcaster, just a radiant to heal, then whatever it takes to refine the carbon. I’d like to suggest the surges of division and gravitation (lots and lots of lashings on something heavy), which would allow a single random skybreaker to accomplish this, if they could find an island on the other side of Roshar. A verdant sporebinder or maybe a spore eater could consume their own vines, then condense the water vapor from respiration to create more. Your aether would probably get mad at you if you did this, but it wouldn’t actually be that hard as long as you also have other nutrients to stay alive. There is also likely a limit on how fast this could work, although you could continually add more people or animals to your sealed off condensation community, feeding them with the vines and collecting the water. This could even be scaled up to the planetary scale. (I’d theorized that Lumar’s seethe worked like this, but was shot down immediately.) Something overcomplicated which involves a soulcaster and some sort of compounder (and sometimes hemalurgy and Lift). Of these, I think the least impractical is to have a nicrosil compounder become an elsecaller (they’re more likely to agree to this than the lightweavers), and inhale a small amount of stormlight, then use most of it to soulcast part of them (their tongue, maybe) into nicrosil. They can store the last bit of stormlight, then compound it to get enough to heal the tongue back. By repeating this (with larger sections of their internal organs over time), they’ll end up with an absurd amount of stormlight, which can be stored in a nicrosilmind soulcast from their flesh if the process for some reason needs pausing. Additionally, depending upon how nicrosil feruchemy works, they may be capable of storing the powers that make this possible and letting other people do the same, or at least enhancing the efficiency of the compounding. If this person were to exist, they would be literally unstoppable, and if they got ahold of just one Breath, they could also compound that to become immortal. Yikes! AonDor is probably capable of this, just because of the sheer versatility of it. Specifically, if you can instruct an Aon to create additional Aons like itself (something that was possible in early drafts), you end up with an exponentially growing Dor conduit. You could instruct the Aon program to create additional effects as well as multiplying, if you wanted it to be actually useful. I believe there was speculation that a bendalloy feruchemist could store metal filings in a bendalloymind. Although this is powerful on its own for a twinborn, it becomes absolutely terrifying for a compounder; they could consume two bendalloy filings, store on in the other, then burn it for ten filings (I believe that’s the compounding ratio). This would allow for infinite bendalloy and infinite nutrient compounding. Even worse, a fullborn could potentially perform this trick to get infinite supplies of all the metals, rendering them even stronger than TLR, because he at least needed metalminds. That being said, I bet there’s some rule about the way subsumers work that would make this impossible. It’s too OP too easily. There’s likely more methods to accomplish this, but I’ll speculate on potential effects and motives for this. If a Shard’s power was drained, they’d first be rendered weaker (like the Preservation and Ruin situation), then their invested arts would likely shut down or weaken, stopping the siphoning. If this didn’t happen, the entirety of the Shard’s power would be removed, potentially allowing the infinity compounder to Ascend. I’m unsure what would happen to the vessel, but they would be: massively depowered and end up as a very weak shard, similar to the Stormfather, complete ejected from their shard and end up back as a human (or dragon or Sho Del or whatever), or simply killed. The most likely motivations for doing this would be either to gain lots of power or shut down a Shard and its invested art. Unfortunately for the Cosmere, the “good” shards are the only ones that I’ve figured out how to drain. (and maybe the Dor. That could make worldhopping to Sel a lot easier.) One of the Odious Skybreakers could camp out at a random island on the other side of Roshar and start mass producing perfect diamonds to completely shut down the Stormlight supply, leaving nearly all the Radiants helpless. Alternatively, the nicrosil compounding elsecaller could be simply trying to accomplish a massive task the requires a stratospheric amount of investiture. Sure, it might tip Harmony way towards Ruin, but this cool planet I Soulcasted from my organs is worth it, right? Right? So yeah, that’s another intimidatingly long post I intended to be like half this length. I can’t wait to see what everyone else thinks.

“It’s a dea- ah!” the Redspine lunges at Tondon’s right side (unless it would for some reason attack his shield). He brings his shield sideways to block most of the blow, taking a few cuts on his unprotected right arm. A few cracks appear in the roseitite. Tondon dances backwards, Pulling, throwing, and batting several objects, somehow sending a sickle thudding into the back of a tree, the iron vials into the air as the extending spines curve towards them, and the steel box stuck to the shield. As he coordinated all three objects, his eyes closed and opened, his Connection surged and receded, and his determination to prove himself was at the forefront of his mind.

Ok, cool. A figure wearing grey and purple materializes upside down in the air, and drops to the ground somehow flipping and landing on his feet. There’s a moment where you’d swear that crystal wings appear around him. He looks around, appearing slightly bewildered. “Not again… Mazikoth, is this your fault? No?” he says, seemingly to himself. Then he turns to the other people assembled inside the attic (it’s an attic, right?). “I’m Vall. Do any of you have a clue where we are?”

What state is Vall in? Is he full dragon, full human, mostly human, or mostly dragon? Any powers you specifically don’t want him to have?