BigBadBagsworth

First off, I think people should cut Brandon a little slack. When you’re writing anything like Cosmere-style fantasy (i.e. based of a wholly unfamiliar planet with a culture and language unconnected to ours) it’s inevitable that things like this will happen. There will always be language humor that only makes sense in Rosharan. There will always be Scadrians proverbs with no good parallel in any real language. I think we just have to accept that this tale is twice-translated (once from December’s language to The language of wherever the tale is being told, and again to English), and that the only way to represent an invented culture correctly would be to go even farther than Tolkien and not just invent but write in the language of that culture. Which would require all readers to read in that language. Which, frankly, is stupid. Now to try to turn this bickering about Latin roots back to an arcanum discussion! First off, I trust Design that time travel is impossible. Especially because a solid list of unproblematic rules for how time travel affects the plot is impossible. Therefore, the first viewing probably happened within the spiritual realm and/or due to use of Fortune. Basically, she didn’t go back in time after her first life, but lived it as a vision that lasted sixty years to her, but a night’s sleep to everyone else. It’s important to ask here whether Hoid has access to long-term fortune. If he does, then any Fortune viewings may be unreliable, especially over longer spans of time. BIG QUESTIONS: Where did she get all that fortune? Is she secretly very highly invested? Or (this is my preferred theory) did something external (like the demon, or another highly invested being) give it to her? It feels a bit like the start of Yumi, when Alternatively, if the fortune was internal, how does she have it? Is December connected to different important invested things than everyone else? It seems like the dominant investiture on demonworld is… well, the demon, along with its rivers of blood. Are there others we don’t know of? What is that demon guy, anyway? December is clearly unusually invested and/or connected; she has the vision, and interacts specially with the river of blood, suggesting her connections and investiture are at least related to the demon. I’ve noticed Brandon doesn’t love writing “Chosen Ones” who were born with the power they use to resolve the book’s conflict (the only one I can think of is Vin, and she still uses ingenuity and arcana to win where pure skill isn’t enough), which is why I’m willing to bet that December was externally invested/connected. And because of the special interactions with the blood river, I’m willing to bet that whatever invested her is at least connected to the demon. It’s a flimsy theory, and I’m fully open to criticisms. I just want more people here theorizing.

Notum would be nice

I’m not a good enough actor for Kaladin, but that would be my first choice. In the realm of roles I can actually achieve, Adolin, then Lopen, then Taravangian (I would love t pretend to be and old dude), then szeth, then scar, then kadash, then Thule, then Geranid’s husband from that one interlude. If I was a girl I would totally go for Jasnah. And Renarin sounds fun.

It seems that when a metalmind is filled, the power instantly diffuses through the metal. So theoretically, you could have a thousand kilometer long breath mind to transport air 1000 km instantly from one person’s lungs to another. More interestingly, imagine a spaceship has a thousand km long nicrosil pole, turns itself into investiture (possibly by having something like Nightblood poke the ship, then store the investiture it turned the ship into in the nicrosil pole) and an awakened metalmind on the other end takes the investiture out. It’d just be investiture at the other end, but it may be possible to have a bunch of the ship’s identity stored at the far end of the pole and recode the identity of the investiture you take out. So, Nightblood takes the ship and turns it into identityless investiture, which instantly travels through the metalmind, and then a metalmind full of the ship’s identity returns the ship’s identity to the un coded investiture, and a ship has traveled one thousand kilometers in no time at all. You could also, instead of using a gigantic, expensive pole, Connect two separate pieces of nicrosil a thousand miles apart, and have them share their investiture the same way someone’s investiture infuses a piece of worn or ingested metal. The problem here is that you’d need to have gone to the place you’re teleporting to in order to have identity at that end and to connect the pieces of nicrosil. But you could use something like Aon Tia to place a 10 pound metalmind where you want to teleport instead of transporting another ship. Or you could use a small ship that only carries the necessary metalminds to transport a ship of almost any size. It would also be possible to use cognitive FTL to place a metalmind in the place you’re trying to teleport to, then teleport. Either way, almost no energy is used.

I can’t join because my school’s workload is inane, but I think the ruleset is awesome.

In this situation, always deny cookies. Most websites don’t steal your soul when you accept cookies, but some people here practice hemalurgy *cough* @Trusk'our *cough*.

I concede this point. You are right, and I am wrong. Then the question becomes, how many of those places is the Vessel’s spiritweb in? And could you use metalminds and connection to re-create a physical manifestation without the Vessel’s knowledge, then stab it with Nightblood, or does my theory just not make sense in the slightest?

Got it. But as true Sanderfans, we should start using base 16, like Scadrians do!

Still, you won’t really find other non-changing, non-arbitrary units for time, and a system needs units for time. Or maybe time between the Big Bang and the first star?

He also happens to be mostly literate, partly sane, and my little brother.

First of all, please use my terminology. A mask is completely controlled by the shard. An avatar was born as a normal being, but was then connected to the shard and gained powers, but can be controlled by the shard at will. I disagree. I have evidence that not all of a shard’s spiritweb (or at least consciousness) is concentrated in a mask. Evidence includes: In Secret History, And in WaT, To re clarify, because that’s apparently necessary: I believe that when a mask is stabbed with Nightblood, Nightblood doesn’t destroy a connection, but somehow uses the connection between the mask and the vessel’s spiritweb to destroy the vessel. If all things in the Cosmere are a combination of matter, energy, investiture and connection, and a certain combination of those four things are automatically inhabited with an exploitable connection to a vessel’s spiritweb (or, if your theory is correct, the spiritweb itself), then if you recreated that combination of investiture and connection, you’d have the same ability to exploit that connection as with a naturally summoned mask. A viable way to do this might be to get an unkeyed connectionmind, have a friendly mask fill it, and then blank the connection and rewrite it’s identity. Sorry! I thought the posts would merge.

? I don’t get it. Why is that funny?

I think he means there’s no reason to choose bottom quarks over charm quarks. I think the best units are the speed of light for speed, time until the heat death of the universe for time, and total energy and mass of the universe for energy and mass respectively, then do what the metric system does and make progressively smaller and smaller fractions of the units.

I think (WaT) Also, tapping an investituremind wouldn’t create anti-investiture, as a similar example. Generally, the more you think about someone, the greater the connections is from you to them, no matter the positivity of thoughts. I’ve always seen connection as the strangest Feruchemical power. Feruchemy is supposed to take from your own body, or a5least to store things that are yours. But connections, by definition, are two-ended, and generally don’t belong to one person more than another. They’re the only Feruchemical power that can directly effect others, rather than affecting a phicical trait of the user that then affects others. For example, if Honor somehow filled a Duraluminmind with the connection he used to sustain the Heralds, they’d just… dissolve. Instantly, anywhere in the universe. There is no other type of Feruchemy that can do that. I think that yes, that could theoretically work, but that’s millions of connections, each of which must be constantly stored in a metalmind to be suppressed. If a strong connector ferrying can meaningfully use 1/5 of their filling power to meaningfully suppress a connection, that’s 5 people at a time. Out of millions. But I don’t think feruchemists can become savants. A savant is someone who’s so invested, it permanently warps their spiritweb. But at no point does a feruchemist invest. The only thing conducting investiture is the metal, so you could theoretically preform Feruchemy while invested with the opposite of Preservation’s Light (anti-Stilllight?) and be perfectly fine. For more info on how this (probably) works:

Sorry I’m late to the party here. I think if we want to get him to read Sanderson, we shouldn’t yell at him to read Sanderson, or, y’know, We’ve just been yelling at him to read without explaining why. People have different priorities. Sanderson addicts tend to be a lot more philosophical about life, but a lot of people don’t care much about things that are hard for them. And people don’t respond well when you repeatedly tell them there’s something they “have to do”. @oragne Here are my opinions on Brandon Sanderson. The stories (the plots of the books, specifically) are amazing. The characters are easy to empathize with and understand, the magic systems are both intuitive and downright epic, and the books never get boring or dull. Confession: I never finished Lord of the Rings. Maybe I was reading with too low comprehension, but 11% of the way through the 3-in-1 omnibus I have, I stopped. It felt like I was reading through honey. The characters were doing stuff, but there was no real emotion in the scene, which made it hard for me to imagine and read through. That has never happened to me with Sanderson. The books are never dull, the characters are realistic, and there’s always some kind of action going on. If you chose to start reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson, it will not be like reading literature, but like a normal, if high-quality, fiction book. Last of all, the morals. Brandon is the only author I’ve ever read who can both write well and spin a good moral. Reading Brandon’s books will have you reconsidering everything you thought you knew about life, then building it from the ground up. You feel like you can tackle life better. The magic systems are both logical and intuitive, but with enough layers and questions unanswered that the only ones to know all the ins and outs of the systems are Brandon and his inner circle. If you choose to go the path of the arcanist, you’ll find swarms (flocks? Cults? Idk) of people willing to talk for hours about fantasy worlds with you. The people here on the Shard are just generally amazing. There are entire sub-communities devoted to Forum Mafia, or Role-playing games, or a dozen other things. The moderators are active and fair, and nearly all the people I’ve met here are kind and understanding. You will find solace here if you ever need it. But despite all the , something I want to make clear is that YOU DO NOT HAVE TO READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO. All of us thoroughly believe that you should, but you’re your own person. You can choose. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

It seems like people are misinterpreting my question. I have noticed that there is evidence that if you took a mask, a tiny bit shardic investiture controlled by a tiny bit of the vessel’s consciousness, and stabbed it with Nightblood, you can kill the shard’s vessel. Since all things in the Cosmere are matter, energy, investiture and connection, and the last two can be easily manipulated with metalminds and identity-blanked with tones, is it possible to create, then subsequently stab, a mask, thereby killing the vessel of the target shard?

Sorry, not kill the shard. Kill the vessel of the shard. Shards are definitely almost impossible to kill without splintering them which takes enough investiture to become a shard yourself. But you might be able to kill a shard’s vessel by stabbing a mask with nightbood, which, for example could kill bavadin so that someone else with more empathy could take up Autonomy, or the same with Odium. And for the second question in the “further questions”, I’m not asking what would happen if you stabbed the mask, but what would happen if you severed the connection from mask to shard.

Warning! The information and references in this question will require you to have read the first 5 books of the Stormlight archive to understand fully. Premises: Shards can form bodies that the are deeply connected to and control. These will be referred to as “Masks”. It is possible that they can only form masks of their former bodies, or you’d have masks that look like the protagonists running around and causing general havoc. The vessel of a shard can be killed if a mask is stabbed with Nightblood. Definitions and clarifications. Shards can have avatars, who give up a measure of their autonomy in exchange for power by pledging themselves to a shard, which connects the avatar and the shard. The shard can use this connection to grant invested arts or control the avatar. Masks are avatars with a deeper connection. Think of avatars as masks with their own thoughts and personalities that the shard occasionally chooses to puppeteer.If all matter is made out of equal parts of each Light, then possibly avatars are made of just one kind of light which gives them deeper connection. But avatars can be chosen simply by swearing allegiance to a shard. Question: Would it be possible to, using an arbitrary amount of investiture and all invested arts, create a Voodoo doll of sorts with enough connection to the shard that, when stabbed with Nightblood, could kill the Shard? Further questions: If Nightblood severed the connection between a mask and the shard, would the mask dissolve, die, or gain sentience? Would this method, if technically true, be viable? A mask would theoretically have access to as much investiture as the shard chooses to give it, and is completely puppeteered by a shard. To use this method, you’d have to first create a mask. Of a shard who can see that you’re trying to kill them. See the problem?

My thoughts on seeing your description of a being of semi sentient investiture inhabiting a metalmind: Also, something I’ve long wondered about. We know from the end of RoW that Nightblood can destroy connections, at least if they’re saturated in investiture, and that the connection from a feruchemist to a metalmind becomes saturated while they are tapping or filling said metalmind. Do you think you could use Nightblood to make an unkeyed metalmind this way? Would it be identical, similar, or vastly different?

By the by, have you read the terms and conditions? There is danger present in the terms and conditions.

His point isn’t that it’s inconstant, just that there’s no reason for it to be 1//299792458⁠ of a second instead of, say, 1//293 455 783. People came up with an arbitrary distance called the meter, then made it precise by linking it to an equally arbitrary fraction of a light second. Also:

Nah, that’s just how she is. Shadow of da Hegamon spoilers:

Name: Dina Country of Origin: Canada. Heritage: German. Strengths, weaknesses, and personality in general can be summed up in one phrase: Hang on. Let me overthink this. Good at: planning, logic, learning, metaphor, tactics, bearing responsibility. Bad at: communication, improvising, rote learning. Personality: A touch autistic. Smart, but bad at communication. Very philosophical; one of the few people who question whether war with the Buggers is moral. Has self-esteem issues. If she were a Radiant, she’d be a 3rd oath Stoneward with her next oath being: I accept that sometimes my best isn’t good enough. Likes learning for the sake of learning. Because of her Canadian accent, she says “aboot” instead of about. Will deny it if confronted, saying it’s a harmful and untrue stereotype. That’s a lie. She really does sound like that, Alright. I’m gonna hibernate now.

@Amanuensis I don’t get either of those photos