Wyrmhero

Ah, I hadn't considered the fact that you could work together to make one. That's a very interesting idea... You still need someone of Eighth Heightening though. Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see.

With regards to the Nalthis Elimination game, I'm not too sure how useful the Awakened Sword would be at 8 Breaths a pop. This leaves you with 1 Breath, assuming you do it immediately when you get to 9th Heightening, and so you can only make one attack before you become drab and can no longer use it without dying yourself. If you wait until you have more breaths, and get to 10th Heightening, then everyone knows you're a threat. Couple that with the lack of a simple way to get new Breaths, and I think it falls into the category of Awesome but Impractical. Not that such a thing shouldn't cost a lot, of course - 8 Breaths is quite a bargain down from 1000! But combined with the fact that it implies a very late game ability, unless some people start with a lot of breaths, I don't think it will have much of an effect. You might have other things to do late-game for a start, like creating Lifeless to save yourself. Maybe it could protect you at night, like a Lifeless/Mercenary, but steal Breaths away each time it does? But then, that might give it too many abilities... As I said, the concept is awesome, but all I can see is someone at 9th Heightening making it and then never using it because they don't want to become drab, or getting to 10th, making it, and then being killed because everyone knew who they were, and the sword stolen from you.

Wyrm sat at a table in today's randomly chosen cafe (red seemed to be the dominant theme here) on his own. He had chosen a corner table. He was quite fond of sitting out of the way like this. It made him feel more secure. Not that he was paranoid, or anything like that. But he did so hate it when someone came up behind him. It felt a little rude, like they were trying to hide their presence from you. He was lucky, today. Not only did he have the coveted spot away from the rest of the people in the cafe, but he had managed to find a book written by one of the Scholars. It had cost him a figurative arm and a leg though. Thank the God-King, Returned or Austre, whichever it was that had set him up with his wealthy backer. He'd never realised that BioChromatic research would be so... Expensive. And that was before he'd even tried actually experimenting with Breath. He'd have to try and get his hands on a large number of them, somehow. At least he could sell them away when he needed the money. Breaths held their value.

Ah, awesome. My first game of elimination, but hopefully I won't do too badly... Well, let's find out! Wyrm shall be a scholar of BioChromatic research, and he hopes to follow the same path that the Five Scholars did before him. He has, however, only just started properly delving into the world of Investiture and Realmatics, so he's missing large pieces of the puzzle when it comes to figuring things out. He likes spending time outside when it comes to writing up his notes, and so he'll often be seen pouring over a thick tome with a hot drink in a local cafe. However, he's far from the best when it comes to research, and will probably find himself quickly in over his head when his studies start to bring him into the social circles and hidden plots of those living in the great city.

Interestingly, this makes two adjacent orders that might possibly have issues with one another - Skybreakers and Windrunners (Lawful versus Good), and then we have Lightweavers - who have Liespren as their bonded spren and craft lies and half-truths with Surgebinding and Illumination - and Truthwatchers (also interestingly, they can make lies with Illumination as well). I'm expecting a little conflict there between Shallan and Renarin. Not much, since they're on the same side, but a little. I'm now wondering if all adjacent orders don't get on perfectly..

We haven't seen anything else that would definitely apply as his boon, at the moment. But then, it is possible he forgot his wife as a boon. But then, what would be his curse? He is also reluctant to speak of his curse and his boon. Interestingly, the times he refuses to say what they are, Renarin is in the room each time, and Dalinar looks at him the second time. I think Renarin reminded Dalinar of his wife in some ways. We know that Adolin and Renarin both get their blond streaks of hair from their mother, but Adolin is by far the more masucline of the pair. Adolin reminds Dalinar of himself. Renarin, by contrast, is the less fighting-oriented, and is probably more like his mother than he is his father. So my guess is this: His boon was to save Renarin's life. Renarin has always been at least a little sickly, notably with his epilepsy. I would not be surprised if he became deathly ill in his past, and Dalinar went to the Nightwatcher out of desparation, not just to save Renarin's life, but also because in watching Renarin die, he was watching his wife die again. While Renarin was saved from death, such a thing would obviously take a toll on the poor boy anyway. It's also notable that in Lift's section, her spren says she has been touched by the 'Old Magic'. If Renarin's spren is of Cultivation, which seems far more likely than it being of Honour, this would be a notable time for Renarin to be touched by it as well. Perhaps Renarin's life was saved by Cultivation giving him the ability to use Regrowth, healing away the illness as best he could when he had no idea how to. This of course would also give us the time, roughly, when he gets his spren, explaining his odd behaviour from a young age. This would also explain why Dalinar hasn't got a spren of Cultivation despite using Old Magic - He used it for a selfless reason (an Honourable reason at that) and wasn't affected positively by the Nightwatcher himself. As such, Dalinar's curse was that while he was able to save Renarin's life, to save the last reminder he had of his wife, the Nightwatcher did the ironic thing and made it so he couldn't remember her at all anyway. Dalinar considers this to be a fair trade for the life of his son, which is why he hasn't sought out information about his wife. Perhaps he fears that if he finds more out about her, the Nightwatcher would take his son's life away for breaking the deal.

I believe that Shinovar has chickens, and therefore presumably rabbits as well. I think Hoid used them because 'An axehound pup and a cremling larva went froclicking in the grass together on a sunny day' doesn't quite have the same ring to it

So does this mean that an Allomancer could run out of Investiture to burn metals with if they did it quickly enough?

So does that mean that the Investiture is actually stored in metals on Scadrial? Else people would have a set amount of Investiture they could use to fuel Allomancy before needing to regain it somehow.

We've seen loads of different types on Investiture so far, and I think it's important to note the similarities and differences between them all, particularly in how they're used. In particular, something interesting caught my eye was a slight discrepency between Surgebinding and pretty much every other form of Investiture used so far: Surgebinding appears to be the only one to actually consume (or at least 'use') Investiture, other than Hemalurgy losing some in the transfer. If we look at Allomancy, we see metals being burnt up. Feruchemy stores stuff in the same fuel. The AonDor allows geometric patterns to have an effect on the world. Forging changes an object. Awakening stores Breath/commands in something. Thing is though, none of these 'run out' like Surgebinding does. Sure, a Mistborn can run out of fuel, and an Awakener can run out of Breath, but neither of these are due to Investiture disappearing, since the Awakener can just retrieve those Breaths. Looking at this, it seems that Surgebinding is the only thing that makes the actual Investiture disappear in a way that can't be retrieved. Allomancy and Surgebinding both use up fuel, but the metals are consumed when using Allomancy. We know this, because metal poisoning can be avoided by burning the metals, which implies that the Investiture is actually the catalyst, not the metal. So the question is why Surgebinding appears to be different, as it doesn't conserve Investiture, does it?

Yeah, I guess I was thinking about the free will thing in far too much of a scientific manner for a fantasy series. Particularly when Sanderson is religious himself, and so wouldn't believe such a thing either. It does make me wonder though if you could doctor an embryo's spiritual DNA before they were implanted, like we can currently perform some genetic alterations. It would almost definitely end up as Mistborn for the rich, much like there are fears of people 'designing' their babies, but it's still an interesting thought. I must admit, I'm not all that clued up on Hemalurgy, and my copies of Mistborn are away from me at the moment. I wasn't aware you had to spike through the heart, I thought it just had to kill. I had actually thought of spiking machines when considering space travel, and whether you could give limited sentience to the spaceship, or whether you could make it burn metals. I supppose it's a fanciful idea that we have no information on whatsoever I do still wonder if you can spike animals, and they have their own bindpoints that no-one ever bothered researching (hey, they're animals, why bother?), or for that matter, whether you can spike Lifeless humans. They might be dead, but they are at least moving again. I know you can't spike dead people to retroactively draw their powers, but Lifeless might slip under that radar thanks to the Breath inside them. They even have something inside them that acts like blood, if they don't have blood itself in poorly made ones. They'd be pretty useless for combat, since Lifeless Allomancers/Feruchemists would probably not be intelligent enough to adapt in a fight, but for menial tasks they would be good.

There are really two questions here, which I have lumped together because the second depends on the first. They aren't theories, as such, more questions that I think are interesting to consider the consequences of. I've read all of the published Cosmere novels, but knowing myself as I do, I've probably missed obvious things which will bring it crashing down my ears. It's mainly to see if anyone knows of any contradictions, and what they think on the subjects. In real life, what we call 'humans' are, biologically, nothing more than a load of physics which builds into chemistry which builds into biology. Free will and so on are regarded by many scientists to be an illusion that we give ourselves. This is solved by Realmatic Theory, in the Cosmere - a 'thing' is defined by what sees itself as a thing, rather than the collection of tiny atoms that builds it up. However, this leads to the question of what a thing is, exactly. Two small ingots of metal would consider themselves separate, but if they were melted together, chemically bonded so they were inseparable, it'd just be a single larger ingot. In the same way, cells in the human body are mere cells, until they are joined together to make a human. Therefore, there is some point where a body considers itself to be crossing the boundary between being seperate and being one. So the question is with regards to cloning and things such as IVF treatment in Scadrial. Would these beings see themselves as whole thing? I'm asking because of Ati and Leras. They had to invest humans in order to create them and give them the illusion of free will. Therefore, in the Cosmere, would such treatments be able exist, particularly for humans? Or would the cells that were used to make them be considered Invested, despite the fact they don't see themselves as part of a human at first? For that matter, are all humans Invested in a small way, and is it active or applied to anything 'human'? I can't recall it being mentioned aside from with Scadrial's and Nalthis's. Secondly, (and I hope I won't be shot for drawing comparisons here) during my weekly Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader session, I had a thought regarding the WH40K Sevitors, which are essentially cyborg robots for those who don't know what they are. They are designed to perform a few simple tasks, have no capability for independant thought, and are either 'grown' or made from criminals. So my thoughts here are regarding Hemalurgy. It allows you to store a part of a person's spiritual identity, depending on the metal, and 'inject' it into someone else as long as they are spiked. Do we think it might be possible to give hemalurgic properties to objects like that? Could it be possible to give a machine a soul? In particular, would it be possible to create a humanoid structure (robot or golem, depending on how fantasy you want it to be), and spike it to make a robot with a soul? EDIT: I've realised I've completely forgotten about Awakened objects, solely concentrating on Hemalurgy in this latter case. So, what might be the effect of spiking an Awakened object? Could you get the breaths out of it and plant them into someone else if the spike was empty? The object doesn't have the ability to follow anything other than basic commands, but if you added a portion of someone's soul to it, might it obtain a measure of 'free will'?